jessa

The blog post title is based on the IFTF Newsletter: Foresight Moves Us to Make Good Choices (Issue #21 | June 2, 2026).

Since grade school, we have scheduled earthquake drills every year to ensure that we know what to do during and after an earthquake. The last time I participated in one was in November 2024, while I was still working in a research lab at the University of the Philippines Diliman. By now, ‘duck, cover, and hold’ has become second nature. But being caught off-guard still gets your knees before your brain does.

The last time I experienced an earthquake at the airport, we were forced to stand still, trusting the building’s integrity, because we were already past security checks and there was probably no evacuation protocol in place. I could have done the ‘duck, cover, and hold,’ but I was too concerned about optics and afraid of looking crazy while everyone else just stood still.

The Philippines is not just earthquake-prone, but it’s also battered by typhoons and flooding every year. Being a vulnerable country to the effects of climate change, we should already be prepared for all sorts of climate disasters. Meanwhile, Paris is rehearsing for a deadly heatwave.

In an exercise called Paris at 50 degrees Celsius, “70 children filed into a cool, dark tunnel in the south of Paris to help the city rehearse for its increasingly hot future.” While the mention of heatwaves keeps me circling back to the opening chapter of the Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate novel), the Philippines should also consider rehearsing for heatwaves as it does for earthquakes. That means mapping designated cooling shelters and running community drills—the same way we rehearse for earthquakes, but for heat. And a community that has rehearsed for everything only shows how it values and cares for sustaining life in this warming world.