Irrigation is a critical infrastructure for food and water security programs of many developing countries, including the Philippines. Consequently, the government has been heavily investing in irrigation development to boost crop yield and to enlarge currently irrigated areas for many years now. However, the Philippine climate has been changing; and the climatic variations and change present potential threats to the resilience of the Philippine irrigation systems to the impacts of climate variability and change, that in turn challenges the sustainability of the government’s investments in food security programs. Climate change is predicted to alter the Philippine water cycle; changing the temporal and geographical patterns of rainfall, evapotranspiration, runoff, and groundwater recharge, and particularly, in their extremes. Extreme hydro-meteorological events have been occurring more frequently in the country today—; strong typhoons with undocumented wind speed and with rainfall of unrecorded amount and intensity are being experienced more often now than before. Spatially and temporally, irrigated agriculture will suffer from the uncertainty of either too much or too little water, or both. The planning, design, and construction processes of new irrigation systems and operation and maintenance of existing ones will be seriously affected by these projected temporal and geographical changes in water availability, or scarcity, or both. Using the systems approach, the study involved a review and analysis of factors that strengthen or weaken the resiliency of the Philippine irrigation systems by conducting an in-depth look into the dynamic interaction, feedback, and processes of social, technical, and physical infrastructures. Out of these dynamics, the intrinsic system resilience emerged to moderate impacts of stresses and episodic shocks. The study indicated that the overoptimistic technical and economic assumptions used in the planning and design process compromised the intrinsic resilience of existing irrigation systems to projected climate variability and change. The continuing inability of systems to fully serve with adequate water the designed area indicates a low level of maintenance and rehabilitation leading to degradation of physical infrastructures. To increase and strengthen both the system’s "soft" and "hard" resilience, the social component of the system, the irrigation agency, and the farmer community, in particular, are undertaking adaptation actions to the resilience of irrigation systems.
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