Boosting the Country’s Recovery with Informed Decisions, Better Policies

The Philippines, the community that we live in right now is suffering from the aftermath of
COVID-19. Our productive sectors like agriculture, industry, and services are put to a halt.
No economy was safe from its vicious hands, especially rising ones—which the Philippines is
most certainly a part of. As the spread of the virus went out of control, our country
struggled to handle the worse economic outcomes. It was a package that came with it.

We are confronted by the harsh reality that we lack planning and we have poor to no
investment in disaster risk reduction. We are always romanticizing about resilience, even if
it costs millions of lives and the future. For one, it is always the people sitting atop the
pyramid that paints resilience as a beautiful oil in canvas—never noticing the blood and
tears that etched the canvas in every stroke.

We, the young, are the ones at risk for the present’s poor planning as we are the one that
will harvest the fruits or should I say disaster of today’s bad decisions.

Despite that, we should continue to stand up and learn from the past mistakes, and
hopefully so, we really learned from it now as we cannot continue to be sick in terms of
economy and health whenever any crises strike.

Like any sickness, recovery is the only way after the suffering. For us to do so, we need a
concrete plan. Setting out responsibilities and liabilities to our government, private sectors,
financing bodies should be first on the list. This is for the reason that we need to manage
risks that come from the negative externalities of economic practices.

As the COVID-19 was believed to be rooted from bats, this calls the humans’ attention to
listen more to their environment, provided that we have two ears and one mouth, listening
pays more especially if we want to build better policies.

Speaking of policies, better ones should be shared—especially ones that concern the
environment. Since our greediness wreaked a havoc that put down millions of people, we
need to create strategies that address environmental concern. According to Professor
Cameron Hepburn from Mega, green policies are more likely to be successful in generating
long-run growth. Thus, we need to make decisions in line of what our environment needs.

There is no need to dilly dally. We need to act as the leaves are wilting, the ice are melting.
We need to take action before we drown into our own mistakes.