Mariejo Ramos

When masked vigilantes killed her husband at the height of the Philippines' "war on drugs" in 2016, Liza Igcasinza admitted to the police that she was using banned substances and was forced to spend a year in rehab.

"I was very frightened. The police took our mug shots as if we were criminals," Igcasinza, now 50, told Context.

The lands of some 12,000 Indigenous Filipinos are under threat from forest loss and environmental degradation near the southern tip of Palawan, known as the Philippines' last ecological frontier for its cluster of islands rich in biodiversity.

But some Indigenous leaders in the western archipelagic province now want to change that by getting investors to pay to reduce deforestation and degradation by purchasing carbon credits.

Four back-to-back typhoons pummelled the Philippines in 10 wild days of November. The storms followed 14 other typhoons to lash the archipelago last year, leaving its rescue teams frazzled, frustrated and burnt out.

Compassion fatigue has now washed over emergency workers in a mammoth wave, submerging the medics and volunteers who stepped into the fray - again and again - with a sense they're drowning.

Plagued with discarded face shields, plastic bottles and other trash during the COVID-19 pandemic, a small riverside community in Manila created its own waste management services, giving its mostly woman workers a chance to boost their livelihoods.   

The Tagumpay 83Zero Waste Association’s network of street sweepers, drivers and creek rangers, who clean up waterways, purchase and collect collect recyclable waste from the community’s 5,700 residents, as well as 24 nearby villages and five schools.

Mylene Cabalona has been taking calls for foreign companies from the Philippines since 2010, the same year when the country overtook India to become the world's call centre capital of the world, employing more than half a million people.

Since then, Cabalona has seen business process outsourcing (BPO) become the largest private sector job provider in the Philippines, now employing some 1.3 million people.

Residents near the Philippines port of Batangas fear five liquefied natural gas (LNG) power plants and two nearby terminals to import the fuel are causing a spate of respiratory illnesses and have appealed to the government to take action.

The government says LNG is a clean alternative to coal and the generating capacity is needed to feed the growing energy needs of the country's main island, Luzon, also home to the capital, Manila, some 110 km (68 miles) to the north.

Delegates from 175 countries have gathered in Busan, South Korea, this week for the fifth and final stage of negotiations for a global U.N. treaty to end plastic pollution.

Plastic production is responsible for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and plastic waste creates a slew of environmental harm - from killing animals who ingest it to spreading toxic chemicals in rivers and seas.

Land is key to the identity, culture and earnings of Indigenous Filipinos, but a lack of deeds or true rights opens ancestral communities to outside encroachment and environmental damage.

The rights of Indigenous Filipinos to their ancestral lands are supposed to be protected by the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997.

Alex Quinones has been a rice farmer in the Philippines for almost five decades - last summer was the first time his field dried up, forcing many of his neighbours to swap farm life for street sweeping.

"We were not able to harvest any rice. This drought was unlike anything we experienced before," Quinones, 62, told Context from his farm in Oriental Mindoro province, southwest of Manila.

Cici Brinces came to Lebanon as a domestic worker 14 years ago, married a Palestinian, had a son, survived leukaemia and was building a new life. Then bombs began falling in Beirut and now she wants to go home to the Philippines.

"I feel that the end is near for me - worse than when I had cancer," said Brinces, 46, who fled her home near the airport two weeks ago and lived on the streets for days before moving into a shelter with her 10-year-old son.