A day before the Christmas celebration, EDGE Davao came out a news report that said P400K-worth of illegal logs in Agusan del Sur was seized by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
“A report from Agusan del Sur Provincial Police Office,” the news dispatched by the state-run Philippine News Agency (PNA) said that “75 pieces of lawaan logs with an estimated volume of 15,467 board feet” were confiscated by government authorities – thanks to a tip of a concerned citizen.
“The success (of the anti-illegal logging operation) is attributed to the combined efforts of the PNP and the DENR as well as the other partner agencies which helped in protecting and conserving our forest here in Caraga region,” PCSupt. Rolando B. Felix, chief of Caraga Philippine National Police, was quoted as saying.
That’s the second good news for the month of December I knew of regarding the status of the region’s forest conservation.
I said second because a few days before the above news was reported, I got a press release from the Therma South Inc. (TSI), an Aboitiz Power subsidiary.
A total of 315,686 seedlings were grown since 2013 as part of its Carbon Sink Management Program (CSMP). Some 295 hectares of land were planted in the areas of Marilog in Paquibato and those places that surrounds the power plant.
“For the past three years, we have planted and grown different fruit trees, indigenous trees, and fast-growing trees intended for reforestation and carbon sequestration,” Engr. Valentin S. Saludes III, TSI plant manager, reported.
The CSMP is the power plant’s flagship environmental program that targets to plant and grow one million seedlings from 2013 to 2020 in 1,000 hectares of land in Davao City. This is done through partnerships with different communities in Davao City.
One of the main objectives of the program is the planting and growing of trees that will “capture” the carbon dioxide footprint of the power plant, thus creating a “sink” or storage for carbon.
“The tree species that are seen to effectively sequester carbon emissions are falcata, mahogany, mangium, and yemane. These are also planted and grown together with other like fruit-bearing and indigenous trees,” said Andrei Vincent Soriano, TSI pollution control officer.
Those are good news indeed.
If the Philippines will not do something now, it would be the first country in Asia to completely lose its forest cover soon. Cebu is a case in point: It has a “zero-forest cover,” said environment officials.
“Most of the country’s once rich forests are gone,” says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) study entitled, “Sustainable Forest Management.”
“We have lost most of our forest of old over the past 50 years and, along with them, many of the ecological services they provide,” deplores Peter Walpole, executive director of the Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC).
In the 1920s, forest still covered 18 million hectares of 60% of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares. It went down to 50% (15 million hectares) in the 1950s. In 1963, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization published data that placed forest cover of the country at 40% (12 million hectares).
By 1970s, the forest cover shrunk to 34% (10.2 million hectares). From 1977 to 1980, deforestation reached an all-time high — over 300,000 hectares a year, according to a booklet published by ESSC.
In 1987, the Swedish Space Corporation put forest cover in the country at 23% (6.9 million hectares). “At the end of the 1980s, out of the 34 major islands that had been very densely forested at the beginning of the century, 24 islands had now less than 10% forest cover,” the ESSC publication said.
In the 1990s, the environment department reported that the country had only 800,000 hectares (2.7%) primary forest cover. Residual forest was placed at 4.7 million hectares.
“Where have all our forests gone?” asked Roy C. Alimoane, the director of the Davao-based Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center (MBRLC). “Why are we losing our trees at a very fast rate?”
The ever-growing population can be partly blamed. “The most likely causes were the increase in population — up from about 500,000 in 152 to around seven million in 1900,” the ESSC publication surmised. Today, the Philippines is home to more than 100 million Filipinos.
“This was accompanied by the spread of commercial crops (abaca, tobacco and sugarcane) and by growth of pasture lands for cattle raising as the Philippines became part of the world economy,” the publication continued.
But logging — both legal and illegal — is seen as the primary culprit. “An important source of deforestation has been the dramatic expansion of destructive logging,” wrote Robert Repetto in The Forest for the Trees? Government Policies and the Misuse of Forest Resources.
The destruction caused by deforestation are already written on the wall. “Deforestation has left upper watersheds unprotected, destabilizing river flows, with significant effects on fish population and agriculture,” Repetto wrote. “The implications for hydroelectric projects and irrigation facilities have already become apparent in Luzon, where anticipated lifetimes of important reservoirs have been cut in half by sedimentation.”
In The World for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it.” Forest is home to some of the most ecologically-fragile flora and fauna.
The Philippine Eagle Foundation said that a pair of Philippine eagle needs at least 7,000 to 13,000 hectares of forest as nesting territory. “The Philippine eagle has become a critically endangered species because the loss of the forest had made it lose its natural habitat,” explained Dennis Salvador, PEF’s executive director.
