3 As a petitioner to this case, I regard my role as a father as one of the most important reasons for being part of this effort. I am married to Atty. Eunice AgsaoaySaño, an environment, community, and academe lawyer. I am father to two children, 15-year old son Yanni Lorenzo Saño and 11-year old daughter Marianne Amira Saño. My dream is to leave my children a planet that is more safe, more just, and more caring. REFLECTIONS On the climate change crisis: “The saddest aspect of life is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” – Isaac Asimov Climate change is one of the most pervasive challenge that humanity has every faced. The climate crisis must be seen as the crisis that it really is. Climate change is happening here and now, and there is no doubt that climate change increases and aggravates factors contributing to poverty and other societal problems thereby posing a tremendous challenge to social and human development. It should be stressed that the ever-increasing risk to global climate disruption is not merely a function of intensified hazards, but largely this risk is a function of people’s vulnerability, which in turn is hugely influenced by socio-economic conditions. As climate change deepens the chasm between rich and poor, the vicious cycle of poverty persists, and as conflicts within state borders and across countries worsen, more people become more vulnerable. This altogether further disrupts the access to the life-sustaining elements of nature, thereby bringing about disharmony between us humans and the ecosystems in which we live and need to survive. If climate change is not addressed adequately, it could seriously hinder our aspirations for a brighter future for the whole world. As such, time is not on our side. For our part of the world, it has been stressed many times that Southeast Asia, and in particular the Philippines, will be the most vulnerable region to the impacts of climate change. Reflecting on how climate change is impacting our communities, we realize that science is becoming so much clearer into focus. Every super storm we will face will have the fingerprints of climate change. A scientist friend, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State told me that if someone asks how we can link typhoons with climate change, we should offer the baseball player on steroids analogy. Take the case of a baseball player who struck 100 homeruns in one season. And then later on he is found to have been using performance-enhancing steroids. The league’s reaction would be to forfeit every homerun. And that is the right response. You do not investigate each and every home run, and analyze whether each of them can be attributable to steroids. He is simply on steroids. The same goes with typhoons. Because of climate change, each and every typhoon today is on steroids.