COP’s the most terrible time of the year.

As expected, super typhoon Haiyan has put the Philippines at the top of Germanwatch’s Climate Risk Index for last year, or its list of most affected countries by extreme weather events.

We all remember the images of the catastrophic Typhoon Haiyan, which wiped out entire regions and took the lives of more than 6000,” said Sönke Kreft, author of the study and Team Leader for International Climate Policy at Germanwatch. “It was the most severe tropical storm ever to make landfall. Last year, at the beginning of the Climate Summit in Warsaw, many people were struggling there for their lives. Climate change must be controlled so that the future will not bring more of these record-breaking catastrophes.”

My country also ranked fifth in their list of countries most affected from 1994 to 2013. According to Germanwatch, which launched the report yesterday here in Lima, the twenty-year index is usually categorized into countries which are continuously affected by extreme events, and those which rank high only because of exceptional events. The authors had this to say, though:

“As a country that is struck by eight to nine typhoons per year and the victim of exceptional catastrophe, namely Typhoon Haiyan, the Philippines suggest that a new and remarkable classification of countries that fit both moulds may be emerging.”

I’ve had practice communicating about extreme weather and climate change for the most horrendous of reasons — a strong typhoon hits the Philippines just before or during the COP for three years now, starting with typhoon Bopha during Durban.

The Philippines is no stranger to typhoons, of course, but since 2009, when typhoon Parma struck Metro Manila, we have played host to extreme weather events every year. And COP season seems to have become a lightning rail for horrible typhoons, this year notwithstanding.

This year, our ongoing nightmare has been internationally named Hagupit, the Filipino word for lash. The typhoon was said to have a 75% chance of landing in our country in a couple of days. But it should be arriving in the Philippine Area of Responsibility by the time I publish this post; I hope I only got my timezone differences wrong and we have more time to prepare.

In my recent editorial for GMA News I wrote about political storms, but since last night I found the lash stinging me much more personally — my sister, a biologist who is doing her fieldwork in the southern region of Mindanao, will evacuate their camp by the coast within the day. Visayas and Mindanao are preparing for storm surges when Hagupit hits the country. Even the rest of my family up north in Metro Manila are expecting moderate to heavy rains. For now it doesn’t seem that we are expecting another Haiyan, but our state weather agency tagged more than three fourths of our country’s provinces as critical areas.

In writing press releases for Aksyon Klima Pilipinas, I am always careful to say that while climate change did not cause these typhoons, it does worsen the odds for stronger and more frequent ones. But the Germanwatch report states that, according to the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we now have a greater certainty than ever before that extreme weather-related risks will further increase with rising temperatures.

Back home, we have a myriad of national and local policies on both disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, some of them conflicting. But apparently, even our National Climate Change Action Plan lacks some elements, such as risk assessments, to be recognized as a National Adaptation Plan (NAP) under the climate negotiations.

Here in Lima, the Philippines should really push for funding, technology, and capacity-building to make and implement these NAPs. Overall, it must strive for adaptation finance on all fronts. Attending today’s finance contact group under the Durban platform, however, has been frustrating, as the delegation seems to be spread too thinly. Our official delegates had to rush from the main conference (COP) plenary; they didn’t bother anymore to get the flag or sit in front, while our veteran negotiator Ditas Muller spoke about the coming storm as the G77 finance coordinator under the Bolivian delegation.

I’m hoping that as more of our delegates arrive in Lima, the seats for important negotiations will no longer be left vacant. It would be a disservice to our fellow Filipinos who are also hoping that they can finally spend Christmas without having to be scared for their lives.