Well, I was impressed to see they evacuated a large number of people this time, ... | Hacker News

Well, I was impressed to see they evacuated a large number of people this time, which hasn't always been the case. that doesn't sem like much but bear mind that the Philippines is a poor country, and second that it's essentially an archipelago made out of hundreds of small inhabited islands with fairly low average elevation (IIRC it's actually a few thousand islands, but not all of them are inhabited).

I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do to 'damage proof' territory like this, other than simply abandoning outlying parts of it and hoping they act as a sea wall (and with a ~90m population, you also have the problem of where to put those people). Their options really are limited, especially in the face of record breaking weather events. Consider that if this storm had hit the Maldives it would almost certainly have wiped out the entire country, permanently.