Power, Politics, and a Planet on the Brink: Asian Journalists Confront the Planetary Health Crisis

Wazzup Pilipinas!? 

Sunway University, Malaysia – A crucial two-day Capacity Development and Training Workshop dramatically sharpened the skills of Asian media professionals, plunging them into the high-stakes intersection of climate, health, and global power. Highlighting the Philippines' critical role on the climate frontline, the training featured a significant delegation of Filipino journalists, including Ross Flores Del Rosario, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the well-known platform, Wazzup Pilipinas.

The "Planetary Health and Power" workshop, held on September 3 and 4, 2025, in Kuala Lumpur, was organized to help thirty journalists from across Asia effectively cover how health, climate, and global governance intersect. The core message was clear: the planetary health crisis is not just an environmental story—it is a brutal narrative of power, finance, and profound governance failure.

Filipino Voices Amplify the Crisis

The presence of five participants from the Philippines, a nation severely impacted by extreme weather and climate finance issues, underscored the urgency of the workshop's objectives. Ross Flores Del Rosario of Wazzup Pilipinas, alongside four other Filipino journalists, received training designed to translate complex multilateral discussions into accessible, human-centered stories.

The workshop emphasized the need to challenge the dominance of Global North perspectives, amplify local and Indigenous voices, and use accessible languages (like Tagalog or Urdu) to make climate stories resonate with regional audiences. For outlets like Wazzup Pilipinas, this focus is vital for connecting remote UN negotiations to the tangible, lived experiences of Filipino communities and addressing domestic issues like fast-spreading misinformation.

The Unseen Battle: Finance as the Defining Issue of Trust 

A central discovery of the workshop was that the battleground for climate action is in the fine print of financial commitments, where finance emerged as the defining issue of trust.

The Debt Trap: Climate funds, often announced with high ambition, are frequently delayed, fragmented, or tied to conditional loans that dangerously deepen debt burdens for developing nations.

Following the Money: Journalists were urged to track financial flows and expose the disparity between what is pledged, what is disbursed, and who ultimately benefits. This is considered essential for holding both donors and recipient governments accountable.

Fossil Fuel's Shadow: The crisis is political, reflecting failures in governance, equity, and accountability. The colossal sum of USD 7 trillion in annual fossil fuel subsidies—equal to 7 percent of global GDP—was highlighted as a clear example of incoherent governance that journalism must expose.

Health: The Urgent and Powerful Narrative Bridge 

Health was identified as the most potent, relatable entry point for reporting on the planetary crisis. Framing stories through the lens of health instantly connects abstract policy to lived human experience.

Connecting Crises: Extreme heat, pollution, food insecurity, and displacement all manifest as health emergencies. Journalists were encouraged to frame planetary health as an issue of justice and wellbeing, not solely environment or science.

Mental Health as a Climate Story: The emerging issues of eco-anxiety and PTSD after disasters remain under-researched, with stigma being a major barrier. Storytelling plays a key role in destigmatizing mental health, linking it to systemic inaction, and engaging professionals to raise awareness.

The Data Gap is the Story: The absence of reliable data on adaptation, mental health, and local impacts signals a form of neglect that itself warrants investigation.

The New Mandate: Scrutiny, Verification, and Accountability

The workshop's hands-on simulations reinforced a new mandate for Asian journalists, focusing on political and information integrity:

Continuous Scrutiny: COPs and summits should not be treated as one-off events, but as part of a long-term story requiring consistent scrutiny of policy implementation and financial follow-through.

Fighting Disinformation: Participants examined how to navigate misinformation and greenwashing without amplifying it. They were advised to investigate the financial and corporate influences behind false claims and to consult independent experts for verification.

Ethical Judgment: The simulation exercises, testing real-time reporting from conflicting sources (including government press releases and fossil fuel announcements), reinforced the importance of verification, critical evaluation, and avoiding the uncritical acceptance of government spin.

By deepening their understanding of how power, politics, and finance intersect with local realities, participants—including Ross Flores Del Rosario—left the workshop equipped to transform complex global processes into credible, impactful, and justice-oriented journalism.

The "Planetary Health and Power" workshop was funded by InTent and organized by the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health (SCPH), in partnership with the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA), the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC), Healthcare Without Harm-SE Asia, and Internews.

The Crayon Box Politics: How Philippine Democracy Became a Palette of Personalities Over Principles

Wazzup Pilipinas!? 

A grassroots political theory is reshaping how Filipinos understand—and challenge—their fragmented democracy

In the bustling halls of Philippine universities and the charged atmosphere of social media discourse, a deceptively simple metaphor has emerged as one of the most incisive critiques of the country's political system: Crayon Box Politics.

The concept is elegant in its clarity. Imagine opening a box of crayons—each stick a different color, each politician a distinct shade. They're individually vibrant, personally recognizable, but fundamentally disconnected from one another. There's no coherent palette, no unified vision. Just a collection of separate hues, each drawing its own picture, serving its own interests.

This, proponents argue, is the Philippines today.

From Metaphor to Movement

What began as an accessible way to explain Philippine political dysfunction has evolved into something more substantial. The theory has gained traction in academic circles, with universities now incorporating it into political science curricula and using it as a framework to analyze the country's electoral pathologies.

The diagnosis is stark: Filipinos vote for surnames and personalities—not for ideologies, party platforms, or coherent policy visions. The result is a political landscape where each color (politician) operates independently, wielding their personal brand for patronage, manipulation, and the fragmentation of the citizenry into competing loyalty camps.

The Architecture of Fragmentation

To understand Crayon Box Politics is to understand the structural weaknesses that have plagued Philippine democracy since its restoration in 1986.

The Personality-Driven System

Unlike established democracies where political parties represent distinct ideological traditions—conservative versus progressive, labor versus capital, nationalist versus internationalist—Philippine politics revolves almost entirely around personalities. Party-switching is rampant and largely consequence-free. Politicians migrate between parties like migratory birds, following not principle but power.

A senator might run under one party, switch to another after election, and campaign for a rival party's presidential candidate—all within a single term. Party affiliation signals not ideology but convenience, a temporary vehicle for electoral success rather than a long-term commitment to a governing philosophy.

The Surname Dynasty

The crayon colors are often hereditary. Political families—the Marcoses, Aquinos, Estradas, Binays, Dutertes—dominate the landscape across generations. According to research, political dynasties control a significant portion of elected positions at both local and national levels, creating a self-perpetuating aristocracy that treats public office as family property.

These dynasties each maintain their own "color"—their own brand, their own patronage networks, their own loyal constituencies. They don't need to build political parties with ideological coherence; their surname is the party, their family history the platform.

Patronage Over Policy

Each crayon operates through a patronage system that keeps voters dependent and fragmented. Infrastructure projects become personal gifts from politicians rather than systematic governance. Disaster relief arrives stamped with a politician's face. Educational scholarships are distributed through personal connections rather than merit-based systems.

This creates a transactional politics where citizens are transformed into clients, and governance becomes a series of personal favors rather than rights-based service delivery. The crayons don't work together to color a coherent national picture; each draws their own constituency, their own sphere of influence, their own fragmented reality.

The Consequences: A Nation Divided by Design

The effects of Crayon Box Politics are profound and multifaceted.

Policy Incoherence

Without ideological parties, there's no mechanism to develop, debate, and implement coherent long-term policy agendas. Each administration starts from scratch, often reversing or abandoning the previous government's initiatives not because of policy disagreements but because of personal rivalries.

Infrastructure plans change with every presidency. Education reforms are perpetually reinvented. Economic strategies shift wildly depending on who holds power. The nation lurches from one direction to another, unable to maintain the consistency needed for sustainable development.

Tribalized Citizenry

Citizens organize not around ideas but around personalities. Political discourse becomes less about debating the merits of universal healthcare versus market-based systems, and more about defending or attacking specific politicians. Social media becomes a battleground of personality cults, where criticism of a political figure is interpreted as personal betrayal by their followers.

This tribalization makes democratic deliberation nearly impossible. Instead of "I disagree with that policy because," political discourse devolves into "My candidate is better than yours." The crayons have successfully divided the box into warring factions, each clutching their chosen color.

Accountability Vacuum

When politicians aren't bound by party ideology or platform commitments, holding them accountable becomes nearly impossible. There's no party manifesto to measure performance against, no ideological consistency to demand. Politicians simply rebrand, switch parties, or leverage their personality cult to deflect criticism.

The crayon that fails simply gets a new wrapper.

The Academic Turn: From Street Theory to Scholarly Framework

What makes Crayon Box Politics particularly noteworthy is its journey from accessible metaphor to analytical framework. Philippine universities—institutions often criticized for being disconnected from grassroots political realities—have embraced the concept as a teaching tool and research lens.

Political science departments are using it to help students understand why Philippine democracy functions so differently from Western models, despite borrowing heavily from American institutional design. Sociology courses employ it to examine the interplay between patronage politics and social fragmentation. Communication studies analyze how personality-driven politics shapes media coverage and public discourse.

This academic adoption represents something significant: a recognition that homegrown frameworks might better explain local realities than imported theories. For decades, Philippine political analysis relied heavily on concepts developed for Western democracies, awkwardly retrofitted to fit a fundamentally different political culture. Crayon Box Politics emerged from local observation and speaks directly to local experience.

The Path Forward: Beyond the Box

The metaphor's proponents aren't content with diagnosis alone. They see it as a catalyst for transformation, a way to motivate citizens to demand systemic change rather than merely shuffling which crayon holds power.

The Call for True Party Politics

Reformers argue for genuine party-building—creating organizations bound by ideology and platform rather than personality. This would require:

Anti-dynasty legislation to break the hereditary transmission of power

Party-list reforms to strengthen programmatic representation

Electoral system changes to incentivize party loyalty over personal brand

Campaign finance reforms to reduce the advantage of entrenched political families

Civic Education and Critical Consciousness

Perhaps more fundamentally, Crayon Box Politics aims to shift voter consciousness. Citizens need to ask different questions: Not "Who do I like?" but "What do they stand for?" Not "What has this politician done for me personally?" but "What systems are they building for everyone?"

This requires massive civic education efforts, media literacy programs, and the cultivation of political discourse that prizes ideas over personalities.

Institutional Redesign

Some advocates push for more fundamental reforms: shifting toward a parliamentary system that structurally requires party discipline, implementing proportional representation to break the two-round presidential system's personality focus, or creating stronger checks on executive power that currently gets concentrated in individual hands.

The Resistance: Those Attached to Their Crayons

Not surprisingly, those who benefit from the current system—the political dynasties, the traditional elites, the patronage brokers—resist this analysis and the reforms it implies.

Critics of Crayon Box Politics argue that:

Personality-driven politics reflects Filipino cultural values of personal relationships (utang na loob, pakikisama)

Western-style party politics is alien to Philippine social structures

The system, however flawed, has maintained democratic stability in a tumultuous region

But as the concept's advocates note, this resistance is precisely why the metaphor matters. Those "attached to their crayons"—benefiting from the fragmented, personality-driven system—have every incentive to preserve it. The challenge is mobilizing citizens who have been divided by design to see their common interest in systemic transformation.

A Theory for the Times

Crayon Box Politics resonates because it captures something Filipinos instinctively understand about their political reality, giving language and structure to frustrations long felt but poorly articulated.

It explains why Philippine politics feels simultaneously familiar and dysfunctional—why elections generate enormous passion but minimal policy change, why corruption persists despite regular transitions of power, why the same families cycle through office generation after generation.

More importantly, it offers a framework for action. By diagnosing the problem as structural rather than merely the fault of individual "bad politicians," it points toward systemic solutions. The problem isn't finding the right crayon; it's redesigning the box entirely.

Para sa Bayan: For the Nation

The rallying cry of Crayon Box Politics advocates is simultaneously simple and profound: Para sa bayan. Para sa kinabukasan natin. For the nation. For our future.

It's a call to move beyond the transactional, fragmented politics of personal loyalty and patronage toward something more coherent and accountable. To demand that politicians organize around ideas rather than surnames, that parties represent ideologies rather than convenience, that governance serves the collective rather than the connected.

Padayon—the Visayan word for "continue" or "press on"—has become the movement's signature closing. It acknowledges that transformation won't happen overnight, that challenging entrenched systems requires sustained effort, that each generation must build on the work of the last.

The journey from metaphor to movement to meaningful reform remains long. The crayons won't relinquish their individual colors easily. The dynasties won't voluntarily dissolve their power. The patronage networks won't dismantle themselves.

But in universities across the archipelago, in social media discussions, in community organizing efforts, a new political consciousness is emerging—one that sees the crayon box for what it is and dares to imagine something better.

The question is whether this consciousness can translate into the institutional transformations necessary to move beyond personality politics toward a democracy of ideas, platforms, and accountability.

The crayons are still there, each with their own color, each guarding their own territory. But more Filipinos are beginning to see the box itself as the problem—and that recognition is the first step toward drawing a different future entirely.

PLASTICS AT COP30: THE UNTOLD FRONTLINE OF THE CLIMATE FIGHT

Wazzup Pilipinas!? 

As the world turns its eyes toward COP30, one truth is becoming painfully clear: we cannot win the fight against climate change without confronting plastics. Behind every plastic bottle, every disposable fork, and every piece of packaging lies a hidden story of fossil fuels — the same oil and gas that drive global warming. Plastics are not merely a waste problem. They are a climate problem, a toxic pollution problem, and a human rights problem — and their ever-expanding production threatens to derail our last hopes of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C.

Plastics: The Fossil Fuel Industry’s New Lifeline

The fossil fuel industry is pivoting. As the world slowly transitions to renewable energy and moves away from coal and gas, oil companies are finding a new lifeline in petrochemicals — the building blocks of plastics. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that by 2030, the petrochemical sector will consume one in every six barrels of oil. This means that while nations pledge carbon neutrality, the same fossil fuel companies are quietly investing billions in new plastic production facilities.

Plastics production already accounts for over 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and if unchecked, could eat up a quarter of the world’s remaining carbon budget. Every phase of the plastic life cycle — from extraction and refining to manufacturing and disposal — releases climate-warming gases. When plastics are burned or left to degrade, they emit methane and ethylene, two potent greenhouse gases that accelerate the climate crisis.

In essence, plastics are fossil fuels in disguise — fossil fuels we can touch, wrap our food in, and throw away after a single use.

A Planet Drowning in Plastic

From 2000 to 2019, global plastics production doubled to 450 million tons — and it’s set to double again by 2040. Nearly 80% of plastic waste ends up in landfills or the natural environment, while millions of tons are burned, releasing toxic fumes into the air. The economic cost to marine and freshwater ecosystems is staggering, but even more disturbing are the invisible costs to human health and biodiversity.

Microplastics have invaded every corner of our world — from the deepest oceans to the clouds above. They have been found in placentas, lungs, and even the human brain. Tiny but deadly, these particles choke marine life, disrupt food chains, and may even weaken the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide — a crucial buffer against global warming. According to emerging research, these microplastics act like “planetary splinters,” silently wounding ecosystems from within.

A Human Rights Crisis in Disguise

The plastics crisis is not just an environmental issue — it’s a human rights catastrophe. The UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights has warned that the plastic life cycle violates a broad spectrum of human rights: to life, health, food, water, housing, and a clean environment.

Communities living near plastic production hubs bear the heaviest burdens — inhaling toxic emissions, facing contaminated water, and enduring the health consequences of an industry that treats them as collateral damage. These are often marginalized communities with the least power to fight back. The injustice is staggering: the profits of the plastics boom are concentrated in corporate hands, while the pollution and disease it spreads fall on the poor.

The Global Plastics Treaty: A Critical Missing Piece

In 2022, UN Member States began negotiating what could become a historic Global Plastics Treaty — a legally binding pact to end plastic pollution “from source to sea.” But like the early days of the UN climate process, progress has been painfully slow.

Negotiations were supposed to conclude in 2024; instead, they remain mired in disputes eerily similar to those that have paralyzed the UN climate talks for decades. Major petro-states and corporate lobbyists are resisting production limits, pushing instead for “waste management solutions” that do little to stem the flow of new plastics. In both the UNFCCC and the plastics treaty process, fossil fuel interests wield enormous influence, often even appearing within national delegations.

Decision-making by consensus — a rule that allows a single nation to block progress — has turned both processes into hostage situations. For 30 years, it delayed action on fossil fuels; now, it threatens to do the same for plastics.

If the world repeats the mistakes of the UNFCCC, the plastics treaty could become another hollow promise — a monument to missed opportunity.

COP30: The Moment of Reckoning

COP30, to be held in Brazil, comes at a critical moment. The host country’s stance could shape the future of both climate and plastics policy. Brazil, a major petrochemical producer, has shown mixed signals: on one hand, launching a national strategy for a plastic-free ocean; on the other, pushing bills that favor the chemical industry and aligning with producer countries to weaken global limits on plastic production.

Observers are watching closely to see whether COP30 will finally acknowledge the link between petrochemicals, plastics, and climate change. For decades, plastics have been treated as a separate issue — a waste management problem — but this artificial divide no longer holds. Plastics are fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are the root of the climate crisis.

A strong outcome from COP30 would explicitly recognize that reducing plastics production is essential to reducing emissions. It would send a powerful signal that the age of petrochemical expansion is over — and that humanity is serious about cutting the fossil fuel umbilical cord once and for all.

Turning Off the Tap

Activists and experts are calling for one clear, urgent action: turn off the tap.

That means halting the construction of new plastic production facilities, setting binding global caps on plastic production, and holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for decades of pollution and deception.

Reducing plastics is not just about cleaning up beaches; it’s about rewriting the future of the planet. Every ton of plastic we don’t produce means less oil extracted, less CO₂ released, and fewer toxins in our air, soil, and water. It’s an act of climate justice — a lifeline for ecosystems, and for generations yet unborn.

A Call to Courage

At COP30, leaders face a stark choice: continue feeding the fossil fuel addiction through plastics and petrochemicals, or lead humanity toward a cleaner, fairer, and truly sustainable future.

For all the speeches, pledges, and negotiations, the question remains heartbreakingly simple:

Will we keep drowning the planet in plastic — or will we finally have the courage to turn off the tap?

“Plastics are the invisible chains that keep humanity tied to fossil fuels.

To save our planet, we must not only clean what’s been spilled —

we must have the courage to turn off the tap.”

— Ross Flores Del Rosario, Wazzup Pilipinas Founder