During plenary deliberations on the proposed 2026 budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), Senator Loren Legarda reiterated the need to apply nature-based solutions in public infrastructure planning and costing.
While she has long emphasized in her speeches that ‘Nurturing nature is our strongest flood defense,’ Legarda called for costing frameworks that also account for ecological and hybrid designs, compared with traditional civil works.
The four-term senator called on the Department of Public Works and Highways to extend the same rigor it has applied in revising its Construction Materials Price Data (CMPD) and Detailed Unit Price Analysis (DUPA) for traditional projects, such as roads, bridges, floodwalls, and pumping stations, to ecological and hybrid designs. Legarda urged the agency to ensure that nature-based solutions are given equal footing in the costing process, so they can be fairly considered alongside conventional civil works.
Legarda, a long-term advocate of environmental protection and climate action, said that constructed wetlands, vegetated floodplains, detention parks, bioswales, permeable surfaces, urban forests, mangrove and riparian restoration, and other climate-resilient landscape interventions are not only climate-resilient but also potentially more cost-effective over their lifecycle.
‘These approaches reduce energy use, withstand climate extremes, and deliver co-benefits for biodiversity, health, and tourism. Yet without standardized costing frameworks, they remain excluded from formal programming and from fair comparison with conventional civil works,’ she said.
Uniquely positioned
Legarda underscored that the Philippines, with its abundance of indigenous resources and ecological diversity, is uniquely positioned to lead in modern, climate-conscious infrastructure design.
‘We cannot continue to measure infrastructure value only in terms of cement,’ Legarda declared. ‘True value-for-money must account for the resilience and sustainability that nature-based solutions bring to our communities. If DPWH fails to integrate these into its costing, we are missing the opportunity to build smarter, greener infrastructure.’
Legarda proposed a dedicated Nature-Based Solutions Costing Framework, parallel to CPMD and DUPA, that would establish standardized unit costs, design templates, and material benchmarks for ecological and hybrid infrastructure.
‘We must conduct comparative cost-benefit and lifecycle analyses between traditional flood control structures and nature-based alternatives, particularly hybrid models that combine both approaches,’ Legarda said.
Legarda further called for a formal study to assess the integration of indigenous and locally sourced materials, such as bamboo, coconut lumber, volcanic aggregates, local stone, and native plant species, into national standards.
‘We have the resources, knowledge, and urgency. What we need is the institutional will to mainstream these solutions into our infrastructure program,’ she added.
She also suggested a pilot program, in partnership with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the Department of Economic and Development (DEPDev), and the academe, to generate local cost data on nature-based and indigenous-material-based infrastructure. According to Legarda, such a program would ensure more sustainable, value-for-money investment decisions while grounding infrastructure planning in Philippine realities.
Legarda, in plenary deliberations with various agencies on the 2026 General Appropriations Bill, has consistently pushed for an all-government approach anchored on nature-based solutions. She underscored that embedding ecological resilience and sustainable practices into fiscal planning is vital to align infrastructure modernization with environmental stewardship.