Julieta Coro, a mother of 11 children who lives with her family close to the sea in Siargao island, recalls how they took shelter from super typhoon Odette’s destruction in December 2021.

The vice mayor of the Siargao town, Romina Rusillon Sajulga, recalls how the community put a diarrhoea outbreak under control in the days after super typhoon Odette hit one year ago.

Filipinos are the most worried about climate change, given the high risk for disasters that their country faces. But a regional survey shows that they are not necessarily aware of the country’s climate policies, such as its lack of a net-zero target.

It is the young people’s responsibility to hold, and pass on, the memories around martial law in the Philippines. a university student writes. The declaration of martial law, whose 50th anniversary was on 21 September 2022, was among the instruments of dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, whose son and namesake is now the country’s president.

Martial law had a ‘smiling’ face, a law-and-order face and one of outright repression, which meant that Filipinos had different kinds of trauma from that time that persist in today’s polarized spaces. But to correct the neglect of the nurturing of public memories, it is time to teach “historical empathy”.

Many university campuses have reopened in the Philippines, which until August 2022 had among the longest school closures in the world. As students mix in-person with remote-learning classes, they wonder how their pandemic-era education will shape their future.

Funny but serious is how cartoons have been in the political conversations in the Philippines, which votes for a new president in May. Visual artist Kapitan Tambay talks to Reporting ASEAN about visual storytelling.

Vintage fashion appeals to consumers who would like their purchases to have a smaller environmental footprint. For the women entrepreneurs who sell them, they are a source of livelihood in hard times, a creative outlet and advocacy  — toward sustainability.

A 21-year-old university student shares his story of trauma, loss, anger and frustration, from experiencing what it means to have a health system that is flailing amid COVID-19. The Philippines has reported 17,800 deaths and has fully vaccinated just 0.23% of its over 110 million people, as of 6 May.

Working at sea is challenging enough. But the pandemic has been a particularly lonely test of mental and emotional resilience for seafarers, due to the nature of their jobs, Helen Sampson, director of Cardiff University’s Seafarers International Research Centre, tells Reporting ASEAN.

Seafarers make up bulk of Filipino workers returning home without jobs amid COVID-19. But home isn’t the best the place to be – many face stigma, and the Philippine economy is in dire straits. Filipinos make up a third of cruise ship staff worldwide. By the Reporting ASEAN team.

If you think kids don’t get what COVID-19 is, think again.  In this six-minute video story by Yasmin Mapua Tang of Probe Media Foundation Inc, they tell us what know about COVID-19 and how they process life during  the pandemic.

The Philippines, the world’s top exporter of labour, is seeing group after group of overseas workers return after losing their jobs in the wake of the economic shock dealt by the COVID-19 crisis. The country has never seen anything like this in its 50 years of experience in labour exports. How will the pandemic change migration? Johanna Son of Reporting ASEAN reports in this Q&A chat.

Talk of media freedom in Southeast Asia these days has to include media accountability. It is time for the different users of the information sphere – journalists, media houses, media monitoring groups, journalism professors and researchers, consumers – to protect the space for free media to operate, Johanna Son writes in this analysis for World Press Freedom Day.

Though far from radical, ASEAN’s consensus document on migration means that the regional grouping has to keep the conversation going, although it still sticks to putting skilled professionals and lower-skilled migrants in separate silos. Doing more on migration might make ASEAN closer to its constituency, as it is a bread-and-butter aspect of foreign policy. Johanna Son of Reporting ASEAN tells us more.

The Philippines as hosted more than 200 ASEAN-related meetings as ASEAN Chair during the organisation’s 50th anniversary this year. But ASEAN remains a mystery of sorts to many Filipinos, who associate with hosting its meetings with holidays, heavy traffic, and evictions of vendors. Daniel Abunales tells us more in this Reporting ASEAN feature.

The South China Sea disputes figured much less prominently in the just-finished ASEAN foreign ministers’ retreat in scenic Boracay – in stark contrast to the February 2017 retreat held in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. ASEAN appears to be bent on not letting the South China Sea issue overshadow the celebrations – and backpatting – around its 50th year anniversary this year, reports Charmaine Deogracias for the Reporting ASEAN series.

Pushing ASEAN centrality. Speeding up the Code of Conduct on the South China Sea. Reviving the East ASEAN Growth Area. Philippine Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr lays down the priorities during the Philippines’ chairmanship of ASEAN in 2017, when the regional grouping turns 50 – in this Q&A with Charmaine Deogracias, a fellow in the Reporting ASEAN series.

The Duterte Administration may have stirred controversies in foreign policy, but it is not expected to rock the boat as chair of the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations in 2017. The Philippines’ chairmanship won’t be as controversial as Cambodia’s was in 2012, asserts Walden Bello in this commentary for the Reporting ASEAN series.