When the Waters Rise

The speakers

Science, history and the built world: each brings a different answer to why the water keeps rising, and what we owe each other when it does. Why we put these three on one stage.

• 

  Dr. Lisandro Claudio

  Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley

  Dr. Claudio is a scholar of political thought and economic policy in the modern Philippines. His newest book, The Profligate Colonial, shows how the United States exported austerityKeeping government spending tight, even on things a country needs. Dr. Claudio traces how American colonial rule ran the Philippines on a tight budget, and what that meant for what the state could build. to the Philippines, shaping what the colonial state could and could not build. His Liberalism and the Postcolony won the Association for Asian Studies' George McT. Kahin Prize. Before Berkeley he taught at Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle.

  lclaudio@berkeley.edu · Berkeley faculty profile

  Books

  • The Profligate Colonial: How the US Exported Austerity to the Philippines, Cornell, 2025
  • Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines, NUS Press, 2017
  • Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
• 

  Dr. Mahar Lagmay

  Executive Director, UP Resilience InstituteA University of the Philippines institute that studies disasters and climate risk and helps communities prepare. It runs Project NOAH., and Professor at the UP National Institute of Geological Sciences

  Dr. Lagmay leads Project NOAHNationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards. Launched in 2012 under the Department of Science and Technology, with Dr. Lagmay as its head, it maps floods, landslides and storm surges for the whole country. The University of the Philippines has run it since 2017., which mapped flood, landslide and storm-surgeA storm surge is seawater pushed ashore by a typhoon's winds. Yolanda's surge in 2013 rose several metres in Tacloban. hazards across the whole Philippines and made them free for anyone to use. The flood maps on this page are his team's. A Cambridge-trained geologist, he was the first Asian scientist to receive the European Geosciences Union's Plinius MedalThe European Geosciences Union's medal for interdisciplinary research on natural hazards., in 2015. In the national debate over flood control, he has argued that new concrete should be the last resort, not the first.

  aalagmay@up.edu.ph · UP faculty profile

  Selected work

  • Project NOAH, the national hazard maps
  • Devastating storm surges of Typhoon Haiyan, 2015
  • Disseminating near-real-time hazards information and flood maps in the Philippines through Web-GIS, 2017
• 

  Dr. Diana Martinez

  Assistant Professor of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley

  Dr. Martinez is an architectural historian of American empire. Her book Concrete Colonialism shows how the United States used concrete, infrastructure and city planning to build its rule over the Philippines. Her next book traces the colonial roots of urban renewalPrograms, mostly in mid-20th-century American cities, that cleared older and often poorer neighbourhoods to rebuild them., from Daniel BurnhamThe Chicago architect and planner who drew up plans for Manila and Baguio in 1905, when the Philippines was an American colony.'s 1905 plan for Manila to American cities. She returned to Berkeley, where she studied architecture as an undergraduate, after directing the architectural studies program at Tufts.

  dianajmartinez@berkeley.edu · Berkeley faculty profile

  Selected work

  • Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines, Duke, 2025
  • Nation Building in the Philippines and the Racial Ordering of International Architecture, Grey Room, 2024

The same day, from 11 AM to 12 PM in B100 Blum Hall, Dr. Lagmay also gives a guest lecture in Development Engineering 203, Digital Transformation of Development, a graduate course in Berkeley's Development EngineeringA Berkeley field that designs, tests and studies technology with and for communities in low-resource settings, from water systems to digital tools. program. It has room for 20 guests on top of the class, in the order people RSVP.

A space for our community

When the Waters Rise is more than a talk. After the panel, the reception in B100 Blum Hall is a space for the Filipino community and our friends to share stories, connect and learn about each other.

• Share. Bring your family's stories of bahaTagalog for flood.. You can also share one here before the day.
• Connect. Meet students, alumni, families and the speakers. Working on a Philippine project? Add a card so people can find you.
• Learn. Visit tables from campus Filipino organizations and hear what they are working on.

Connect around Philippine projects

Bayanihan for typhoon relief

Alongside the event, we are raising funds for the Bayanihan Response for Disaster Relief, run by NAFCON, the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns. It supports families in the Philippines hit by Typhoon Tino and Super Typhoon Uwan. Any amount helps, and every donation goes through NAFCON's own donation page.

Scan the code with your phone camera, or use the button. More about the campaign.

Donate to the Bayanihan campaign (opens NAFCON's site)

Where to go

The talk is in Banatao Auditorium. Afterwards we walk over together to Blum Hall, right next door, to meet the speakers. Directions by BART, car and Caltrain.

• 1Banatao AuditoriumRoom 310, main level of Sutardja Dai Hall, 2594 Hearst Avenue at LeRoy Avenue. The talk, 4 to 5 PM. Doors open at 3:45 PM; check in at the front desk outside the auditorium.
• 2B100 Blum HallJust west of Sutardja Dai Hall, joined to it by plazas and bridges. B100 is on the plaza level. Meet the speakers after the talk.

Photo by UC Berkeley Disability Access and Compliance.

Our supporters

The departments, organizations and people helping make When the Waters Rise happen.

Dr. Lagmay joins us from

• University of the Philippines
• UP Resilience Institute
• 

About the map, your answers and the data

• Your name and email are only for the RSVP list. They never appear here or at the event.
• The map shows counts by Bay Area county and Philippine province. If you pick "Prefer not to say", you are counted but not placed.
• If you share a flood story and say yes to sharing it, a teammate reads it first. A few may be read aloud at the event, never with a name.
• The blue is where a 100-year rain would flood, shaded by depth. Guimaras, Siquijor, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi have no NOAH 100-year map in this set, and some provinces are only partly mapped. At the event, the map zooms into a few towns to show every building and street.

Data and sources

• Flood hazard: UP NOAH flood hazard maps (UP Resilience Institute), for a 100-year rain.
• Buildings: Google-Microsoft-OSM Open Buildings, combined by VIDA, which joins Google Open Buildings (CC BY 4.0), Microsoft Global ML Building Footprints (ODbL) and OpenStreetMapA free map of the world made by volunteers, like Wikipedia for maps. The streets in the town closeups come from it too.. For Macabebe, the same three sources as merged by Overture Maps.
• Streets: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), from the Geofabrik Philippines extract (for Macabebe, via Overture Maps).
• Land and province outlines: PSA administrative boundaries via HDX, and philippines-json-maps (PSA, 2023). Bay Area counties: click_that_hood.
• The floods named at the event: Flood history, from BahaWatch. Photos from Wikimedia Commons, credited where they appear.