The declaration by experts confirms that infrastructure alone cannot solve Cebu’s flooding crisis. Planners, scientists, and community advocates have long warned this truth. Drainage projects may manage water. However, land use decisions determine where the water goes.
No flood control masterplan, regardless of engineering quality, will succeed while:
- Upland forests and recharge zones shrink faster than detention basins are built
- Commercial land zones double, increasing impervious surface cover
- Core city residential areas are compressed, pushing communities into hazard-prone uplands
- Agricultural and green buffer landscapes decline at scale
- Critical slope, soil, and watershed protections remain advisory—not mandatory
The problem is not simply inadequate pipes and culverts.
The problem is unregulated sprawl, declining absorption capacity, and the absence of enforceable ecological limits in land development.
The science is clear: Flooding is a land use failure before it is an engineering failure.
A city loses flood resilience when rainfall has nowhere to go. This happens when forests are fragmented. It also occurs when slopes are sealed and floodplains are built over. Additionally, housing is pushed uphill without geotechnical, drainage, or watershed safeguards.
The recently approved Cebu City CLUP and Zoning Ordinance thus arrives at a critical inflection point.
Commercial zones have expanded. Forests have been reduced. Affordable housing provision is minimal. The plan must now integrate mandatory disaster-responsive corrections in its implementation phase. This must happen before more irreversible exposure is built into the urban footprint.
We call on city decision-makers to embed the following as binding implementation requirements:
- Slope-based and hazard-based development controls for uplands
- Mandatory stormwater detention, permeable surface thresholds, and infiltration standards per project
- Watershed and ridge-to-reef protection zones with enforceable buffers
- Moratorium on approvals in high-risk upland settlements pending risk audit
- Mid-rise affordable housing incentives within safe urban zones to prevent uphill displacement
- Integration of Metro Cebu-wide watershed governance beyond city political boundaries
- Creation of an independent CLUP implementation oversight body
Development is not the crisis. Ungoverned development is.
No amount of pumping stations, river walks, canal clearing, or floodgates can compensate for lost forests. They cannot compensate for paved watersheds. They cannot address displaced communities and weakened soil absorption systems. Lost forests, paved watersheds, displaced communities, and weakened soil absorption systems.
Cebu must move beyond treating floods as an aftermath problem.
Flood risk must be prevented at the point of land conversion, zoning approval, and building permit. It should not be addressed only by draining after the storm.
“What protects a city is not just how it builds its drainage…
but how it plans its land.”
We urge the City Government to ensure that CLUP implementation corrects the risk drivers of future disasters. National oversight agencies should also ensure corrective measures are taken. It should not institutionalize these risk drivers.
The aspiration should change. It should not be:
“Cebu that survives floods.” It should be:
“Cebu that no longer floods because it was planned correctly.”
Real LexEcon 