The Philippines is highly vulnerable to weather-related and other natural disasters given its location in the Pacific Ring of Fire. Its disaster organization, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council or NDRRMC, however, has limited capacity, as demonstrated in its handling of natural disasters in the last 20 years. In this paper, we adopt a comparative approach and compare the NDRRMC with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and South Korea’s Disaster and Safety Management (DSM) in terms of mandate, organizational structure, resources, and technical capacity to identify possible areas requiring reform. We observe that the NDRRMC’s working group structure, policy making, coordination, integration, supervision, monitoring and evaluation mandate, lack of strong leadership structure, and limited resources and capacities hinder it from providing a swift and effective response. This warrants a revisiting of policies and benchmarking on other disaster organizations like the U.S. FEMA and South Korea’s DSM. Our findings lead us to recommend that the Philippines consider establishing a separate Department of Disaster Resilience equipped with the mandate, authority, leadership structure, resources, and technical capability to effectively prepare and respond to disasters instead of simply expanding the authority of the NDRRMC.
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