NO LEADER SERIOUSLY TALKING ABOUT PHL ENVIRONMENT

NO LEADER  SERIOUSLY TALKING ABOUT  PHL ENVIRONMENT

By Michael A. Bengwayan, Ph.D. Environmental Resource Mgm’t

When we put economy over ecology, then we just destroyed the future.There are no truer or more prescient words, yet no one is talking about this with urgency.

The  environment is the driving force on which the future of this planet rests. And yet, daily our leaders are focused exclusively on the economy or plain loco politics, to the almost complete exclusion of the ecology. The Congress is in effect an economists and bureaucrats’ forum where the larger natural environment has been given short shrift.

Climate change and global warming have been reduced to just two more stock market indices and are being computed only in terms of their impact on GDP percentages, industrial growth, unemployment figures. food production. climate refugees, the optimum mix of energy types, and so on. We do not see a convergence  between the threatened environment and the need to put economy’s gains to preserve it.

No one is talking about the threat to the natural environment or ecology which has sustained man ever since he crawled out of the sludge millions of years ago: the forests, rivers, wetlands, glaciers, mountains, snowfields, coral reefs, and the flora and fauna that depend on them.

The problem has been reduced to a mathematical formulation- 2* C temperature rise, and the solution to a catch phrase- " carbon space." As if the capping of green house gas emissions is all that is required to save the world.

What about the rampant destruction of our ecology? Forests which hold the soil, retain water, give us oxygen, absorb carbon: is  the Paris accord aware that our existing forests contain more carbon than what is present in the world's atmosphere? Rivers which nurture civilizations but are being dammed and polluted out of existence? The wetlands which control floods and erosion and provide livelihoods to millions? The mountains which moderate climate and control run-offs?  Our coral reefs which not only shelter islands but also provide a unique eco-system for marine life, but are now being obliterated by pollutants and chemicals in the oceans? And finally, what about the mind boggling diversity of animal life which these natural wonders contain, doomed to extinction not because of green house gases but because of our ruthless greed and apathy?

   Here is what is happening to them:

* Philippines lost an average of 262,500 hectares of forest per year. This amounts to an average annual deforestation rate of 2.48%. Between 2000 and 2005, the rate of forest change decreased by 20.2% to 1.98% per annum. In total, between 1990 and 2005, Philippines lost 32.3% of its forest cover, or around 3,412,000 hectares. Measuring the total rate of habitat conversion (defined as change in forest area plus change in woodland area minus net plantation expansion) for the 1990-2005 interval, Philippines lost 7.9% of its forest and woodland habitat. 

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*  the Philippines is the "hottest" of the 25 so-called "bio-diversity hotspots" in the world - a record that does not speak well of the government's environmental conservation program and the public's apathy to environmental concerns. Hotspots are areas with the least number of species existing, the least number of species found in an exclusive ecosystem and have an alarmingly high degree of threat against the existing species.
 

* 29,817,000 hectares are suffering from uncontrolled deforestation especially in watershed areas; soil erosion; air and water pollution in major urban centers; coral reef degradation; increasing pollution of coastal mangrove swamps that are important fish breeding grounds. 

 There is a contempt and disregard for the natural ecology in the Philippines. The regulatory mechanism to protect the environment set up by enlightened individuals and the courts is being dismantled under the garb of " ease of doing business".

Roads are being allowed in National Parks and  trees are being cut mercilessly. Commercial gardeners are destroying natural habitats, the sanctity of buffer zones are being violated, mining is being permitted in hitherto " no go" areas, river-linking projects are being rammed through without any environmental studies, the Forest Rights Act has been deliberately diluted to enable easier diversion of forest land for industry.  

Our  4 billion years old world is dying in just less than  a thousand years of man’s existence. the Philippines in just 500 years since Magellan landed. There is no Earth B, no Philippines B. Once we destroy the environment, where will we go? Where  will the unborn go?