Everything Was Gone: A Lived Climate Crisis Experience

Typhoon Tino, 2025

When the storm came, it took everything with it.

Our livelihood, the little security we had built, all gone. In a matter of hours, the floods tore through our community, leaving behind only fragments of what used to be home. My family, our house, and our dogs survived, and for that, I am grateful. But the loss is still unbearable.

The bridge collapsed that morning. It took hours before we even understood what had happened. We had no contingency funds, no backups, no savings to fall back on.

The waters didn’t just wash away our possessions; it washed away years of hard work, patience, and effort. This is not just a natural disaster it is the daily face of the climate crisis. Families like mine pay the price of a crisis we did not create. While the rich and powerful continue to profit from destruction, ordinary Filipinos are left struggling to pick up the pieces.

Fossil fuel corporations, neoliberal capitalist systems, and the Global North’s relentless emissions have brought us to this point. Add to that is the unbelievable corruption in the Philippines, a perfect storm of injustice.

We are angry, and we have every right to be.

We don’t just need relief goods or sympathy. We demand reparations for loss and damage, a tangible recognition that our suffering is not an accident but a consequence of climate injustice. We need laws like the CLIMABILL in the Philippines to ensure that those truly responsible are held accountable and that climate survivors are not left to rebuild from nothing.

This is not just my story. It is the lived pain of thousands of Filipinos who did nothing to deserve a world that keeps burning.

BagyongTino #ClimateJusticeNow #LossAndDamage