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Friday, March 29, 2024

NDRRMC, DepEd recommend strategies for K-12

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The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council and the Department of Education have recommended the use of the Albay disaster risk reduction strategies—compiled in a manual—as reading instructions for the K to 12 Curriculum.

These DRR strategies along climate change adaptation, pioneered by Albay Second District Rep. Joey Salceda when he was governor for nine years, helped transform his calamity battered province to a global model of disaster resilience, and an economic and tourism hub in the Bicol region.

Salceda said in a statement teaching effective DRR and CCA strategies to the young would help build strong and resilient communities, better prepared to confront the risks brought by ill effects of climate change.

Titled “Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation, Disaster Risk and Vulnerability Reduction Integration Across K to 12 Education Curriculum,” the manual was submitted by Salceda last year to NDRRMC and DepEd.

It was reviewed and certified by the Bureau of Curriculum Development and the  Bureau of Learning Resources.

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DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones, in a recent letter to Salceda, expressed appreciation for the lawmaker’s “overwhelming and dedicated support to the development of supplementary reading materials,” for K to 12 students.

Briones said the “learning resources underwent content review” by the BCD and the BLR, and were “found suitable for printing and use in public schools from Grades 4 to 10.”

Defense Undersecretary Ricardo Jalad, executive director of NDRRMC and administrator of the Office of Civil Defense, issued last April 18 a memorandum urging regional and local DRRMCs to use the materials “that seek to mainstream Climate Change Adaptation Risk and Disaster Risk and Vulnerability Reduction… with the  aim of providing awareness among students on existing hazards within their communities and the available means of mitigating and preparing for any calamity…”

Jalad cited section 14 of RA 10151 which provides for the “integration of disaster risk reduction education into the school curricula.” He likewise recommended the book as materials for the training of local DRRMCs.

The manual was developed by the Local Climate Change Adaptation for Development, the Albay Second District Office and the House Special Committee on Climate Change. 

It takes inspiration from an earlier model titled “Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation integration in Philippine Education Curriculum,” taught by 8,000 public school teachers in Albay since 2011, which proved effective in basic community resilience.

Aside from a good number of important legislation he authored, Salceda is also the principal sponsor of the pending bill in Congress seeking to create the Department of Disaster Resilience, a well-structured agency designed to manage a broad climate-disaster program of governance as the country confronts more and more calamities of greater frequency and magnitude. The new agency, he said, will be “tasked to carry out a continuous, consistent and fortified calamity defense program and ensure the country’s sustainable development and inclusive growth.”

For his CCA-DRR advocacies as Albay governor, Salceda was honored as UN Senior Global champion for DRR during the 2010 Asian Ministerial Conference on in Incheon, South Korea, and elected as co-chair of the United Nations Green Climate Fund Board in Paris, France in 2013, the first Asian and Filipino to lead the Fund’s 24-member Board.

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