04/01/2026
New year: New Challenges, New Opportunities and New Tasks!
The Morong Volunteers (MVERT) welcomes the new year fully aware of and ready to face new challenges and new opportunities posed by the situation in 2026. More so, we are preparing and strengthening our ranks to ensure that the Morong Volunteers can shoulder new tasks arising from these new challenges and new opportunities.
The major challenges and opportunities in 2026 are as follows:
• Challenge: 2026 could likely be among Four Warmest Years on Record. The United Kingdom Meteorological Office (UK MET Office), estimates that the global temperature for 2026 to be around 1.46 °C above the average for the pre-industrial period (1850-1900); this would make 2026 the fourth in a row of warmest years to be above 1.4 °C.
Global extreme heat in 2026 caused by the climate crisis would intensify existing impacts like heat-related illnesses, wildfires, and water shortages, straining our health, power, and food systems, particularly affecting vulnerable populations and outdoor workers, leading to economic losses, reduced productivity, and infrastructure strain. Expect worsened air quality, droughts, energy demand, and disruptions to daily life and agriculture as warming approaches the critical 1.5°C Paris target. Unfortunately, Morong, Rizal has no existing comprehensive Extreme Heat Risk Action Plan to decisively address extreme heat hazards and risks like most LGUs in the Philippines.
Opportunity: The good news is the Philippines is actively working on an extreme heat risk action plan, with the government, health bodies, NGOs and UN agencies pushing for strategies to address rising temperatures, including developing national frameworks, local government actions, and workplace guidelines for 2026 and beyond, acknowledging extreme heat as a major, systemic threat. Morong should be an active participant and player of this initiative.
Morong Mayor Sidney Soriano has recently donated a secondhand Penetrator Fire Truck to the Morong Volunteers although it needs repair and full restoration so it can increase MVERT’s firefighting arsenal during the hot summer months when more structural and bush fires happen in our town.
• Challenge: Worst-case Scenario Intensity VIII Earthquake. The worst-case scenario intensity VIII ground shaking triggered by the movement of the West Fault and an unnamed fault located about 8.7 kms away from Morong remains an existential threat to our town. There is an urgent need to build and strengthen not only public schools’ and buildings’ earthquake preparedness and response to such worst-case scenario, but most of all, the 8 barangays in Morong though barangay earthquake contingency planning and community earthquake drills.
Opportunity: The Morong Volunteers and Mdrrmo Morong Rizal have started the community earthquake contingency planning and drill in Barangay San Jose. The task at hand is no less than to replicate this initiative in other barangays in Morong.
Within 2026, the Philippine and Japanese governments are set to revisit the twenty-year old 2004 study on the impact of the so-called “The Big One,” a 7.2-magnitude earthquake or stronger in Metro Manila. Updating the 2004 Metropolitan Manila Earthquake Impact Reduction Study (MMEIRS) provides key guidance to LGUs in NCR and nearby provinces including Rizal for scaling up their earthquake contingency plans based on new risks and metrics.
• Challenge: Moving Beyond Traditional Flood Control Infrastructure Projects. Filipinos commonly think of concrete dams, walls, barriers, and ditches when talking about flood control methods. These are “traditional hard engineering solutions,” and while these may make sense conceptually, these have been “rendered useless by widespread institutional corruption.”
Opportunity: The solution, therefore, requires not just better traditional hard engineering solutions, but a redesign of the landscape through wholistic, community-based, flood-control planning and nature-based solutions such as massive reforestation, rainwater harvesting, sunken lawns and underground tanks to manage excess water, bamboo plantation on river banks, and green infrastructure under the “Sponge City” model which focuses on accommodating and redirecting water, instead of controlling and containing it.
These solutions are already available. The task at hand is to think outside of the box, adopt low-cost nature-based defenses against flooding, and empower local communities to become active planners, implementors and eagle-eye monitors of these projects to ensure transparency and accountability and community ownership of these better flood control projects.
Let us welcome the New Year. Respond to and Embrace New Challenges and New Opportunities. Take on New Tasks.
