By Gerry T. Estrera
“For over a century, we have waged a relentless assault against our once majestic woodlands. We have laid to waste millions of hectares of forest land, as though heedless of the tragic examples of the countries of Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, where large areas have become barren, if not desertified. If we have not reached this state, we are almost at the point of irreversibility.” — ex-Senator Heherson Alvarez If figures from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) are to be the basis, the country’s forest cover is increasing.
The Forest Management Bureau (FMB), a line agency of the environment department, reports that in 1998 the forest cover was 6.48 million hectares. As years went by, it started to increase: 7.168 million hectares in 2003, 7.391 million hectares in 2005, and finally 7.8 million hectares in 2008.
The figures indicated that the Philippines’ total forest area “has actually increased in a 10-year period,” said Dr. Rodel Lasco, Philippine coordinator of the Bogor-based World Agroforestry Center.
This is indeed good news. Our forests harbor one of the highest biodiversity resources in the world, said Lasco, also dean of the College of Forestry of the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB). They are also significant carbon sinks able to absorb all our greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels, making us almost carbon neutral.
Recent studies show that trees can help sequestered carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Carbon sequestration describes long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming and avoid dangerous climate change. Carbon dioxide, in the form of gas, can be sequestered out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. The carbon dioxide is converted into sugar by the plant or emitted back to the air through perspiration.
Julius Cawilan, chief of the forest research conservation division of the DENR in the Cordillera, told a news daily a couple of years back that a healthy, single and mature tree could store about six kilograms of carbon yearly while a hectare of trees can also absorb carbon emitted by a car traveling 1,600 kilometers.
According to the DENR, a single mature tree can absorb carbon dioxide at a rate of 21 kilograms a year and release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support two persons. For every ton of new wood that grows, about 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide are removed and 1.07 tons of life-giving oxygen are produced.
“Where have all our trees gone?” environmentalists wondered. More than 90 years ago, the Philippines was almost totally covered with forest resources distributed throughout its 30 million hectares. These resources provided income, employment, food, medicine, building materials, and water as well as a healthy environment.
In the 1950s, only three-fourths of the archipelago was covered with forest, according to the environment department. When Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972, the figure of forest cover had shrunk to half; by 1988 only quarter was wooded and just one tiny fraction of this was considered untouched forest.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said about 7,665,000 hectares of the country is forested. Between 1990 and 2010, the country lost an average of 54,750 hectares per year.
If you think deforestation happens only in the uplands, you’re wrong. Even in the lowlands, mangroves are fast disappearing. Mangrove forests grow where saltwater meets the shore in tropical and subtropical regions, thus serving as an interface between terrestrial, fresh-water and marine ecosystems.
In 1981, there were an estimated 450,000 hectares of mangrove areas in the country. Since then, there has been a decreasing trend from 375,000 hectares in 1950 to about 120,000 hectares in 1995.
At that time, one environmentalist wrote: “All over the country, whatever coastal province you visit, you see the same plight – desolate stretches of shoreline completely stripped of mangrove cover and now totally exposed to the pounding of the ocean’s waves.”
“Deforestation is terrible,” deplores Dennis Salvador, executive director of the Davao-based Philippine Eagle Center. “The Philippine eagle has become a critically endangered species because the loss of the forest has made it lose its natural habitat.”
The natural habitat of the Philippine eagle consists mainly of old-growth forests from 100 meters to 1,000 meters above sea level. Unfortunately, these are the habitats that are also fast disappearing due to deforestation.
Who had the privilege of cutting trees? asked veteran journalist Marites Dañguilan-Vitug in an article she wrote for World Paper, a Boston-based magazine. The wealthy and well-connected; they lived in the big cities. Some even sold their rights to the forest concessions and lived off the green of the land. Moreover, money for logging supported candidates during election campaigns.
What about those upland settlers and indigenous tribes who are found inside the forest or immediate vicinity around it? “Among these are the people who constitute the greater threat to our remaining forest: the slash-and-burn farmers, the fuel-wood gatherers, and the charcoal-makers,” pointed out Heherson Alvarez, former DENR head.
In a speech delivered during a conference in Isabela some years back, Alvarez said: “Poverty, lack of jobs and wages, and absence of farmlots in the lowlands have forced these men to invade the forest.”
Now, who should be blamed for the disappearance of our forests? “The illness of our forest is complicated — and cannot be cured — with a one-stop prescription of a single medicine,” says Alvarez, who is now with Climate Change Commission. “A comprehensive, scientific and ethical strategy and coordinated efforts are needed to care for and manage the forests through sustainable development.”
But Nicolo del Castillo, an architect by profession who teaches at the University of the Philippines, thinks deforestation is just a symptom of a bigger problem. “I probably sound baduy (tacky and outdated) but I see the problem in the prevailing system of values, that is, the greed, the need to be the biggest, the wealthiest, and sometimes you feel hopeless,” he says. “I am an optimist, but possibly there will be more tragedies and maybe then more people will wake up.”
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