We pay an awful lot of attention to lawyers and politicians in this country, perhaps even more so these days, when an impeachment trial is being broadcast live and Filipinos are getting a crash course in constitutional law. We listen to lawyers argue, senators debate and politicians accuse one another.
That is fine. Democracy needs lawyers and government needs politicians. But the country needs scientists, too, especially when so many of the problems that will determine how we live in the years ahead-climate change, flooding, food and water security, energy, disease and affordable medicines-cannot be solved by politics alone.
My interest in this is admittedly personal. Both my children chose biology. My daughter Gabby, a DOST-SEI undergraduate merit scholar, graduated magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, where her undergraduate research included studying the ecological condition and microbial water quality of portions of the Molawin River exposed to human activity. She later worked on freshwater and marine ecological surveys for environmental impact assessments, studying fish, corals, seagrass and other marine life around proposed solar and industrial projects in different parts of the country.
My son Jacob, a De La Salle University Biology graduate who is finishing his master’s in Wildlife Science at UPLB, has done biodiversity fieldwork in Mindoro, surveying terrestrial vertebrates and the environmental conditions of their habitats.
Their work has given me a better appreciation of what science looks like outside the classroom. Someone has to test whether a river is polluted, establish what wildlife and marine life exist in an area before development alters it, determine what environmental damage a project might cause and recommend ways to reduce that damage. Decisions about development, conservation and public safety are better when they begin with evidence rather than assumptions.
Gabby is now pursuing her master’s in Environmental Science, major in Environmental Change and Sustainability, at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice on a scholarship from the Italian government. Watching both of them pursue careers in science has made me think more about how much-or how little-we invest in Filipino scientists.
Government does invest in them and deserves credit for that. Under the proposed 2027 national budget, the Department of Science and Technology is slated to receive P30.9 billion, including P8.67 billion for STEM scholarships expected to support more than 67,000 scholars. Billions more will go to research and development.
That sounds substantial until you remember that the proposed national budget is P7.2 trillion and compare us with countries that decided long ago that research and development are investments in their future.
The latest internationally comparable figures put Philippine spending on research and development at only around 0.3 percent of gross domestic product, compared with more than 1 percent in Thailand, around 1 percent in Malaysia and close to 2 percent in Singapore.
The difference becomes even more striking when you count researchers. The Philippines has only about 170 full-time-equivalent researchers for every one million people based on the latest internationally comparable Philippine data, compared with more than 700 in Vietnam, more than 1,800 in Thailand and more than 8,000 in Singapore.
The years covered by the available data differ among countries, so these are not perfect apples-to-apples comparisons. But the disparity is too large to dismiss. We are trying to compete in a world increasingly driven by science and technology with a remarkably small scientific workforce.
The problem starts long before scientists enter laboratories. In the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment, only 23 percent of Filipino 15-year-olds reached at least the baseline level of proficiency in science, compared with 76 percent across OECD countries.
Consider flooding, a problem Filipinos certainly know something about.
Project NOAH was created after Tropical Storm Sendong devastated parts of Mindanao in 2011 and killed more than a thousand people. Filipino scientists subsequently developed high-resolution flood maps, rainfall and water-level monitoring systems, storm-surge models, landslide assessments and other tools intended to tell communities where disaster was likely to strike.
The original DOST-funded research program ended in 2017. DOST maintained that NOAH had been designed as a time-bound research program, its deliverables had been completed and its technologies were being transferred to agencies such as PAGASA, PHIVOLCS, NAMRIA and the Mines and Geosciences Bureau. UP nevertheless considered its scientific work important enough to preserve, and the UP Board of Regents adopted NOAH, which eventually became part of the UP Resilience Institute.
Nine years later, after billions upon billions of pesos have been poured into flood-control projects and Filipinos continue to wade through floods, the government has released P1 billion to UP to strengthen Project NOAH.
The funding will support artificial intelligence-enhanced flood modeling, real-time hazard monitoring, LiDAR mapping, data analytics and predictive flood forecasting. NOAH scientists can also use computer simulations to determine whether proposed flood-control interventions will actually work before government spends billions building them.
There is something almost painfully obvious about that idea. Instead of spending billions pouring concrete and discovering later that the floods remain, government can first spend a fraction of the amount on scientists who can tell us where the water will go and whether a proposed solution is likely to work.
The larger lesson from NOAH is that scientific capacity cannot always be treated as a project with an expiration date. Flood maps need updating as cities grow, rivers and drainage systems change and rainfall patterns are altered by climate change. It is not enough to fund the technology; we have to fund the scientists who keep improving it.
Covid gave us another reminder. Science gave us diagnostic tests, vaccines, genomic surveillance and treatments, while Filipino researchers developed a locally produced Covid-19 RT-PCR detection kit and helped track new variants through genomic sequencing. Nobody knew beforehand that Covid was coming, which is precisely why scientific capacity has to exist before an emergency arrives.
We already have examples of what Filipino scientists can accomplish. They are developing rice varieties better able to withstand drought and studying traditional Philippine rice varieties for traits that could produce more resilient and nutritious crops. DOST-supported technologies have turned seawater into drinking water for island communities, while government-supported research helped turn lagundi and sambong into standardized medicines familiar to millions of Filipinos.
This is the kind of science that directly affects ordinary lives, whether through the food we eat, the water we drink, the medicines we can afford or knowing which communities will be underwater when the next typhoon comes.
There is also the question of what happens to the young Filipinos we educate to become scientists. Scholarships are wonderful and we should provide many more of them, but a scholarship is only the beginning. Scientists need laboratories, equipment, research grants and, ultimately, careers that allow them to remain scientists without constantly wondering where the next grant or decent-paying job will come from.
Otherwise we educate them and somebody else benefits from their talent.
There is nothing wrong with Filipinos studying or working abroad. Science has always crossed borders. My own daughter is fortunate to have received a scholarship from the Italian government to pursue advanced environmental studies, and I am grateful that another country saw enough promise in a Filipino student to invest in her education.
But it inevitably raises a question for her own country: Are we willing to invest just as seriously in our young scientists?
The Philippines ranked 50th among 139 economies in the 2025 Global Innovation Index and, interestingly, ranked higher in innovation outputs than in innovation inputs. In simpler language, Filipinos appear to be producing more innovation than might be expected from the resources available to them. Imagine what they could do if we gave them more.
Congress will spend months arguing over where P7.2 trillion should go. Education, hospitals, roads, agriculture, defense and social services all have legitimate claims on public money. But science should not really be viewed as competing with all of them because better agricultural science improves food security, medical research improves health care, climate science improves disaster preparedness, engineering improves infrastructure and energy research can help produce cheaper and cleaner electricity.
Research can look like an expense until the day we desperately need what that research produced. That is why countries invest in scientific capacity before they know exactly when they will need it.
Meanwhile, we continue watching politicians, watching lawyers and following impeachment trials, elections and whatever political controversy comes next. Those things matter. But Filipino scientists are also working on questions that may ultimately matter much more: how to grow enough food in a hotter world, where the next flood will go, how to provide clean water and cheaper energy, how to make medicines more affordable and how this country can live with a climate that is already changing.
Science may not win elections and scientists seldom have billboards along Edsa. But their work can save lives, solve problems and save government billions by showing us what will work before we spend money on what won’t.