Manila (Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN)- Baguio City in northern Luzon in the Philippines is most vulnerable to climate change of the four cities outside the National Capital Region that were studied by the World Wide Fund for Nature-Philippines.
A Climate Risk Assessment Study made by the WWF and the Bank of the Philippine Islands Foundation Inc. of the cities of Baguio, Cebu, Iloilo, and Davao showed that the northern Luzon metropolis is most vulnerable to extreme weather events.
According to the study, this was due to Baguio City's density and amount of rainfall that it gets every year. Of the four cities surveyed, Baguio City, also known as the country's Summer Capital, is the only that is on the direct path of the typhoons, which usually hit Central and Northern Luzon.
Davao was seen as the least vulnerable among the cities with room for sustainable, integrated area development, the WWF said.
Although Iloilo is rapidly becoming urban and is flood-prone, it has managed to keep its population growth down to 1.53 percent, addressing the population density issue.
Cebu, dubbed the Queen City of the South, remains prominent in manufacturing and trade industries and as such has an opportunity to reinvent itself with investments to "climate-proof" infrastructure and technology to strengthen its current economic supply chains, the WWF study said.
