Memorandum for the Petitioners \ 3 Climate change is the greatest threat facing Filipinos today. It is an existential risk and a humanitarian nightmare that impedes the country’s aspiration to rapidly move forward and develop sustainably for present and future generations to come. While typhoons have always been a cause for concern among Filipinos, climate change is making matters worse. It intensifies storms, extends the dry season, and alters the normal course of the climate. It does not take scientific or climate expertise to understand what this means: climate change will destroy Filipinos’ livelihoods and cause widespread food insecurity in the country. 7 It will claim lives through disasters, disease, or starvation. Those fortunate to survive will be displaced and become strangers in their homeland, losing a sense of belonging from the community with whom they used to live. Young people will be forced to become breadwinners to compensate for the injury or loss of their parents, robbing yet another generation of their ability to realize their dreams. r r This National Inquiry bore witness to these injustices. We heard a young Indigenous woman of the Aeta-Ambala8 who shared her fear of losing the cultural traditions of her people because the forests, springs, and lands no longer provide the food and medicine they have always relied on. She told us about her father, a farmer unable to bear the extreme heat, forced to work shorter hours for a reduced income, making day-to-day survival even harder. A rice fanner9 invited us to see in a grain of rice the symbol of a dream, a hope, a dying family legacy, and now a wretched livelihood. He illuminated the tragic irony of farmers those who feed this country going without enough to eat, dragged deeper into poverty and debt to regenerate their fields after typhoons drown the crops, only to worry about the drought that may come later. He laid bare for us the ingredients of life that climate change is taking away: food to eat, land to till, and a home to live in. Nag-uulyanin na ang panahon. “The weather is getting more senile,” he said, and farmers are at its mercy. — — A leader from the LGBTQIA+10 community in Tacloban11 helped us understand what may appear to be simple and everyday luxuries for many of us, like a refrigerator, represented to her a dream , conjured by years of sacrifice, determination, and hard work only to be washed away in the hungry storm surge of super typhoon Yolanda (internationally known and hereinafter referred to as “Haiyan” ). The same super typhoon displaced a — Exhibit “L” to “L-38 ,” Literature Review of Studies Related to Climate Change Impacts in the Philippines. 8 See Exhibit “M” to “M-4,” Saiaysay> ni Bb. Rica Diamzon Cahilig , dated 16 March 2018 . 9 See Exhibit “U” to “U-2 ,” Salaysay ni Gg. Felix “ KaJhun” Pascua, dated 17 March 2018. 10 Lesbian, Gay , Bisexual , Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual , and many other terms. 11 See Exhibit “LLLL” to “LLLL-4 ,” Salaysay ni Arthur SGolong, dated 16 August 2018 . 7