The Philippines' capital is running out of water. Is building a dam the solution?

The giant white marble boulders that line the Agos River just north of the Philippine village of Daraitan are sacred to the Indigenous Dumagat people. They use the boulders to perform rituals to ward off sickness and keep their village safe. If the Kaliwa Dam is built upriver, the Dumagat say these rocks will be destroyed to make way for the increased water flow. Ashley Westerman/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Ashley Westerman/NPR

DARAITAN, Philippines — Nestled in the Sierra Madre more than two hours outside Manila, this village is lush and green — brought to life by the Agos River, which cuts through the unforgiving terrain like a quiet, slow-moving highway.

Daraitan is a tourist village of about 5,000, where children play in the river while the adults cook fish and fix their broken karaoke machines under makeshift tents on the banks.

"The community is peaceful. We have everything we need here," Maria Clara Dullas, 43, tells NPR.

Dullas is a member of the Indigenous Dumagat people, who claim this area as their ancestral lands. Her family are farmers, like most in the area, and have lived off the land and the river for centuries.

., clashes are playing out all over the world as people try to adapt to the threats from climate change. The choices are acute in the global south: countries there, like the Philippines, are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather, but they often lack the resources or civil society safeguards to make sure solutions help people equitably.

, Filipinos use between 48 and 108 liters per day. So as Manila's population rises every year, the current water supply cannot keep up, he says.

The Metro Manila area is home to more than 13 million people. Officials say the megalopolis may begin to experience a water shortage in 2024 that could become extreme by 2027. Veejay Villafranca/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Veejay Villafranca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

But there's another driver of the water shortage: the anticipation of the next El Niño, a naturally occurring weather pattern that has to do with the ocean getting warmer along the equatorial Pacific. El Niños are known to bring less rain, which means "there will be less rain for those dams that impound water for Metro Manila," Sespene says.

There is currently an El Niño affecting weather worldwide, but Philippine climate scientists and officials expect upcoming ones to be worse. Climate experts say man-made climate change will exacerbate the effects of future El Niño events.

with the Manila-based Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities says.

The Philippines is one of the most vulnerable countries when it comes to climate change, Along with droughts, the archipelago nation has also experienced sea level rise, ocean acidification and more extreme weather events, such as multiple devastating typhoons in recent years.

In 2020, more than 4 million Filipinos were displaced because of the effects of global warming, the 2021 Global Report on Internal Displacement . And soon millions may not have enough water.

But building the Kaliwa Dam is not a "silver bullet solution," Dela Cruz says.

"It could have a role to play because it has scale. It's bankable; it can be invested in real quick," he says. "But it shouldn't happen at the expense of other equally important issues. For example, Indigenous peoples' rights, forest and land degradation, and so on."

The Agos River cuts through the Sierra Madre in the Philippines' Rizal Province. Officials hope to build a new dam upriver from the village of Daraitan to increase the water supply to the capital, Manila. But the project threatens the environment and people who live downstream. Ashley Westerman/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Ashley Westerman/NPR

Dams and their downsides

While dams are often billed as a drought-protection measure and a renewable energy source, they have also been known to contribute to climate change — such as emitting a lot of planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane when the lakes created by dams suffocate and kill vegetation, releasing those gases into the air.

Dams can also intensify drought by diverting water from rivers and increase the risk of flash flooding by releasing too much water during storms. Brian Eyler, director of the Stimson Center's Southeast Asia Program, says dams have to be built and operated in a sophisticated manner.

"Dams are just kind of Band-Aids," Eyler tells NPR. "Because the weather is going to become so much more extreme, to the point that it's hard to predict how to design a dam for that future extremity."

But in the Philippines, people seem more distracted by other things concerning the Kaliwa Dam, such as how much the dam will cost to build and who is paying for it.

Dela Cruz says the connection between the dam and how it could possibly be a solution to climate change is also not being made explicitly.

"I think the discussion has not matured enough to allow a more nuanced discussion about how a dam can be part of a broader resource management system in the Philippines," he says.

Maria Clara Dullas (far right) and other community leaders of the Indigenous Dumagat community wash their faces in the Agos River. Their people, mostly farmers, have lived off the river for generations. Ashley Westerman/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Ashley Westerman/NPR

A disjointed conversation

The existence of climate change is not up for debate in the Philippines. But how to adapt to it and integrate those adaptations into the nation's development plans is still an open, often hotly contested question — a familiar struggle that is taking place across the globe.

Maria Clara Dullas of Daraitan doesn't feel like her Indigenous Dumagat community is being included by the Philippine government in discussions or decisions about development or climate change adaptation.

"We aren't against progress," she says. They just don't want to see their homes destroyed.

But while the national government has offered the entire village the rough equivalent of a little over $1.4 million to relocate, Dullas says she cannot imagine leaving home.

"We keep saying we don't want to benefit from the dam," she says.

The Dumagat people just want what is theirs: the land.

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