Trees: Protection from flash floods, landslides By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

Trees: Protection from flash floods, landslides

By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

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August 26, 2018

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In Photo: Trees in Maasin, Southern Leyte

For thousands of families from Metro Manila, Calabarzon to Central Luzon, Ilocos region and up to the Cordillera Administrative Region, many may be familiar with the Biblical Noah’s Ark story.
But millions more have or are getting an experience of what it is.
To meteorologists at the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa), the government’s weather agency, this is all part of climate change where a phenomenal rainfall volume in 2009’s Typhoon Ondoy (international code name Ketsana) was dropped in just one day.
To environmentalists, the floods are worsening because the people have destroyed nature’s first defense against it—the trees.
“If you have trees within and around  communities, you will not worry too much about flooding as those who have treeless areas,” ecologists at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NULS) and the Center for International Forestry Research (Cifor) would say.
Erratic rainfall could worsen with soil erosion and landslides, the two international environmental agencies said.

Trees prevent floods, landslides

Trees contribute immensely in preserving soil. Far reaching roots hold soil in place and fight erosion, NULS-Cifor said, adding that trees absorb and store rainwater, which reduce runoff and sediment deposit after storms.
They help the groundwater supply recharge, prevent the transport of chemicals into streams and prevent flooding.
Trees help reduce erosion by increasing filtration, holding soil particles together, and slowing wind and water flow, the research institutions elaborated.
Each mature tree, about 10 years old, absorbs in its trunk and branches some 1,500 liters to 2,000 liters of water which help keep the water table up. The trees’ roots suck water deep from under the ground to as low as 200 feet.
They hold the soil together so that erosion is prevented. They absorb rain during rainy days such that water run off is prevented from going down low-lying areas like residential places, streets and markets, NULS-Cifor ecologists explained.

No trees, no protection

The environmental group Cordillera Ecological Center (CEC) in Baguio City explained: “When there are no trees to protect the soil, gully erosion occurs because the shape of the terrain concentrates water flows over or through the land; and the soil is not cohesive enough to prevent soil loss.”
This is what happened in Rizal province, where years of quarrying, especially in Rodriguez and Montalban has resulted in gullies that brought down rainwater inundating towns up to Marikina river.
Gully erosion is best controlled by planting trees on higher ground around the gully area, CEC said.
Citing its many years of forestation experience, CEC said wherever possible, trees should be planted in conjunction with deep-rooted and fast-growing grasses, which will also use water, increase infiltration and control flow.
While slowing of water flow may not prevent gully erosion completely, it can dramatically reduce the rate of erosion.
Diversion banks can take water elsewhere, but quite often this shifts the problem to a new site. Building a dam is an effective but expensive solution, CEC bared.

Trees help hold the soil together

Although not as important as reducing flow, trees planted in and around the gully may help hold the soil together. The closer to the gully, the wetter the soil will be, and may need to be planted with different species.
To avoid scouring, plant small shrubs with flexible stems within the gully rather than trees, CEC explained, adding that it had a five-year tree-planting experience in stopping gully erosion in the town of Mankayan caused by the Lepanto mining activities in Benguet.
CEC environmental specialist Dobbels Wallang said sheet and rill erosion can also happen if a property is treeless. To prevent this from happening, trees should be planted across the slope. The distance between the rows of trees planted affects the slope’s length which, in turn, affects the rate of soil loss, he explained.
Trees and shrubs can also be planted in strips along contours to check run offs. Banks can be used to decrease slope length, but trees are much less susceptible to damage by floods than conventional banks, and have the added bonus of increasing the rate of water infiltration, he added.
Making the Agno River as an example, where dozens of Pangasinan and La Union barangays were flooded by the overflowing river, Wallang said trees can also be planted on river banks to provide bank stabilization.
While trees obviously cannot change slope steepness, they will slow down the rate of water flow when planted across the slope. Trees are most effective on steep slopes when used in conjunction with dams, contour and diversion banks for changing slope angles and increasing infiltration, he said.

The land can save communities

CEC Foresters Darwin Pandosen and George Facsoy, who have led CEC reforestation efforts in Leyte and Davao del Sur, said to fully understand the problem of flooding and landslides, one must understand the land.
“The land is like a sponge, it can only take so much, and without trees holding soil particles together, it is bound to release what it has absorbed,” they said.
And when water is released, it follows its own level as a law of physics. Therefore, trees at the higher elevation of every communities should be preserved, should be planted and low-lying canals and rivers banks’ hedged with trees, they recommended.
The foresters frown on the existing procedure of deepening canals. Instead, they said, roads and pathways should be elevated and hedged with trees.
During dry season, they said, grass, sedges, bushes and shrubs must not be cut because these act as soil cover, preventing topsoil erosion from torrential rains come rainy season.
In the Philippines trees are being felled at a rate of 300 hectares to 600 hectares annually, a cut  rate so fast, many of the trees have never been seen by the existing generation.
The country, like most developing nations, is vulnerable to global warming. The problem is made worse by the widespread destruction of forests.
The trees, once a symbol of the Philippines’s rich and proud heritage, tell its people of what they are—strong, enduring, hardy, magnificent and symbolize all the people of  the country.
All of a sudden, they are being destroyed along with generations yet to come.
The enemy: the people.
Bengwayan has a masters degree and PhD in Development Studies and Environmental Resource Management from University College Dublin, Ireland, as a European Union fellow. He is currently a fellow of Echoing Green Foundation in New York.

IPs: Vanguards of world’s biodiversity By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

IPs: Vanguards of world’s biodiversity

By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

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August 12, 2018

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In Photo: An Ifugao man from Banaue sits in front of the world-famous rice terraces.

The United Nations has set August 9 as the International Day of Indigenous Peoples but to most IPs worldwide, it is just another day of facing complex threats to their survival as distinct peoples.
Not only are they confronted with dispossession of their lands and physical persecution, they are also faced with appropriation of natural resources and their collective knowledge of this, which they developed through the ages.
Their traditional knowledge of food crops, medicinal plants and survival are being taken by multinational companies and commercialized.
IP knowledge on agricultural biodiversity
In the early-1980s agricultural scientists from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization discovered that Azolla, an algae, could fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and help fertilize rice crops. Armed with this know-how, they traveled to Mountain Province of the Cordillera region of the Philippines, intending to introduce the technology.
To their surprise, they found out that farmers in that province have, for hundreds of years, been integrating Azolla in their rice paddies because, through ancient observation, they have realized that their rice crops grew better when grown with Azolla.
Many beneficial farming practices exist today that have emerged from IPs’ ingenuity—terrace farming, agroforestry, organic gardening principles, to name a few.
Many food crops as well exist today because they owe their genetic continuity to IPS.
The Convention of Biodiversity (CBD) says the systematic collection of IPs’ agricultural genetic diversity contributed considerable economic benefits to the world.
Genes from crops grown by IPs for only 15 crops contribute more than $50 million annually in US alone.
About 60 percent of the germplasm collected in gene banks of members of the International Agricultural Research Centers worldwide came from crops nurtured by IPs for centuries, CBD said.
These include thousands of varieties of rice, corn, wheat, potato, beans and root crops.
IPR regimes threatening IPs’ biodiversity
The toil of indigenous and tribal peoples in domesticating, breeding and conserving biodiversity over the centuries is being endangered by the demand of bioprospecting corporations to apply intellectual-property right (IPR) regimes.
IPR regimes are rights to ideas and information, which are used in new inventions or processes. These rights enable the holder to exclude other users from using or marketing such process or invention. In short, IPRs is, therefore, a monopoly over commercial exploitation.
The existing IPR regimes today fail to recognize the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples to their own knowledge and innovation.
In my book Intellectual and Cultural Property Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of Asia, I argued that multinationals from the industrial world exploit IPs’ biological wealth and then sell the patented products back to them at excessive prices.
The growth of biotechnology industries, combined with the loss of biodiversity worldwide, has focused the attention of governments, corporations and others on access to and control of genetic resources—mainly because of the tremendous potential for generating commercial profits, I wrote in the book.
The food crops, medicinal plants, other biogenetic resources, as well as traditional knowledge on these, have become commodities, to be bought, sold and traded, I added.
Commodifying the world’s most consumed crop: Rice
In 2008 I was a speaker at International Rice Research Institute’s (IRRI) scientific congress, and brought to tour its high-tech gene bank that could withstand earthquakes, floods, bombs and fire for the purpose of protecting thousands of rice varieties of seeds and ensure that these be grown by future generations.
The seedbank, holds all the world’s rice, many of which are indigenous varieties that now have disappeared in farmers’ fields.
IRRI scientists said the seedbank intends to prevent monopoly of commercial plant breeding in the hands of a few transnational companies that now control significant gene banks.
However, such claim is misleading because today, the value of IRRI’s contribution to the rice production of developed countries runs to millions of US dollars every year, based on the production of US semi-dwarf rice crop developed on the basis of IRRI material, some traits of which came from rice, originally grown by IPs.
Thousands of indigenous rice varieties in Asia and Africa have been lost through the years as genetically tinkered rice.
As a rule, rice farmers save some of their crops to use as seed the following year. But with many IPR regimes controlling rice now, farmers would have to pay royalties on the rice seeds from patented seeds and even where farmers were the source of original stocks, they would not be allowed to use or market them under GATT rules.
As it is now, 70 percent of developing countries rice varieties are from IRRI. This means the rice seeds are not in farmers’ fields and control. As such, it also places farmers at the mercy of inorganic fertilizer and pesticide multinational companies.
Pharmaceutical biodiversity
According to the Rural Advancement Fund International (RAFI), 80 percent of the world’s population is dependent on traditional medicine and medicinal plants for their health security.
The conservation of many of these pharmaceutical biodiversity lies in the hands of IPs, RAFI said.
Two-thirds of the world’s plant species—35,000 of which have medicinal values—have in one time or another used by IPs in developing countries, RAFI added.
But it lamented that so many of these plants, which are communal properties, are now controlled by the pharmaceutical industry that earn millions of dollars annually through drug development, much of the raw materials of which are exported by Third World countries to developed nations.
The US National Cancer Institute alone collected 23,000 plant samples from 7,000 plant species in Southeast Asia from 1980 to 1995.
Already, about 7,000 medical compounds that make up the Western pharmacopeia came from plants associate with indigenous peoples using these as medicine, RAFI said.
IPs struggle against biopiracy
The extraction of biodiversity resources to supply resources for the biotechnology industry is alarming many IPs.
IPs’ organizations say this threatens their access to and control of their collective property and their collective knowledge of the traditional uses of exotic and endemic plants, which they have been using as food and medicine for centuries.
On the global level, international nongovernment organizations, such as RAFI, Genetic Resources Action International and the Third World Network have been joining local NGOs to raise awareness on the biopiracy problem.
They are keeping watch over patent applications in various patent and trademark offices worldwide.
In 1995 they with 200 organizations worldwide from 35 countries petitioned the US Trademark Office to revoke a patent given to R. Grace Co. to use a pesticidal extract from neem, an endemic tree of India. The petitioners said the company was usurping age-old biological processes of India’s IPs.
On February 1995 Asian IPs organizations protested to the European Union and United Nations against all forms of genetic manipulation and destruction, and criticized Western efforts to “negate the complexity of any life form by isolating and reducing it to its minute parts…. and thereby alter its relationship to the natural order.”
IPs’ representatives also figured prominently in negotiating for the adoption of a Biosafety Protocol in the CBD. Adopted in 2000, the Biosafety Protocol “regulates the transboundary transfer of genetically modified organism across national borders.”
The struggle by IPs to protect their biodiversity resources remains relevant. On the other hand, some are too focused on the international arena that they do not feel the impact to what is happening on the ground.
It is time to rethink this position.
Bengwayan has a masters degree and PhD in Development Studies and Environmental Resource Management from University College Dublin, Ireland, as a European Union fellow. He is currently a fellow of Echoing Green Foundation in New York.

Thinning forests resulting in fuelwood shortage By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

Thinning forests resulting in fuelwood shortage

By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

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August 19, 2018

In Photo: Few trees are standing in the mountainous part of Nueva Ecija brought about by natural forest fire due to the effect of El Niño.

Fifty years ago, the Earth was annually losing forests the size of England. Today, the world loses 14 hectares of tropical forest every minute, mostly due to agriculture to support growing populations and fuelwood for cooking fires.
Yes, fuelwood is now a culprit in deforestation.
In Africa, Asia, South America—continents where large populations rely heavily on fuelwood for cooking—women and children who bear the burden of looking for fuelwood, are walking longer hours just to search or cut trees for firewood.

Lack of fuelwood: The next energy crisis

Almost 2 billion rural people in developing countries do not have enough wood to cook their meals. Their number will grow to 2.5 billion by 2025.
Fuelwood supply and demand are coursed through head loads, camel trains, donkey and bullock carts, bicycles and shoulder loads. Ultimately, fuelwood ends up in cooking fires.
So says Earthscan, a London-based information think tank on environment issues citing United Nations Sustainable Report “Understanding Fuelwood” by Phil Barry Munslow and Phil Okeefe.
“The fuelwood problem has been isolated as an ‘energy crisis’ issue. Interventions to date have concentrated on narrowly defined technical options for supply enhancement or demand constraint. But there has been a failure to understand the fuelwood problem correctly,” it said.
“And unless developing nations adopt a serious and a no-nonsense approach to save its forests and woodlands, fuelwood will be the most serious energy crisis for the next 50 years,” it warned.

Rising fuelwood demand

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) figures show that from 2000 to 2004, Southeast Asian countries have been using more wood for cooking with Cambodia, Lao PDR, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines as the top users, followed by Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
Forest loss is acute in these countries, the second of the world’s great biodiversity hot spots. According to 2005 report conducted by the UNFAO, Vietnam has the second-highest rate of deforestation of primary forests in the world. More than 90 percent of the old-growth rainforests of the Philippines have been cut.
Other Southeast Asian countries where major deforestation is ongoing are Cambodia, Indonesia and Lao PDR.
Their combined fuelwood use is responsible in the deforestation of 72 percent of forests in the five-year span.
In South Asia top fuelwood users are Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal and Pakistan, accounting to 77 percent to 79 percent of total forest loss in the region, also in the five-year stretch. By region, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China are the top fuelwood consumers.

Culprits

It would seem unfair to blame housewives—particularly those who toil the land—because generally, women farmers are known links to biological continuity.
To dispel such notion, the UNFAO made a study and noted that until 1980, firewood demand was a minor cause of deforestation. Women and children were collecting and using mostly branches and twigs while leaving trees standing.
But after that decade, due to rapid population growth in the rural areas, trees, big and young, started to be cut purely for fuelwood.
Often, young trees were the first to be cut, including those in reforested reservations and sanctuaries, UNFAO reported. When the small trees were consumed, fuelwood gatherers de-branch bigger trees causing many to die. Eventually, when the big trees dry and die, they are cut, UNFAO concluded.
The deplorable predicament worsens deforestation, and further aggravated by farmers clearing lands for livestock and crops.
To this day, forests are fair game as forest fragments crumble to almost daily cutting and gathering for fuelwood.
While not quite deforesting the globe, these problems are undermining the well-being of hundreds of millions of people in at least two continents—Asia and Africa.
Fuelwood consumption exerts pressure on the resource base if it is increasing at a rate higher than the growth of trees.

Inefficient stoves compounding the problem

Most rural folks in poorer Third World countries cook over open fires. The most common is the “three-stone fire,” the fire set between three stones bricks or whatever to support the cooking pot.
But this open fire system is wasteful and inefficient. As more wood is burned and wasted, more fuelwood is gathered, more trees cut, more forests ravaged.
To employ measures to improve fuel efficiency, there is a need to sustain a campaign for more efficient rural stoves.
Traditional stoves used inside rural homes have to be replaced by more energy-efficient stoves that don’t soot homes and cause upper respiratory ailments to family members.

Using alternative resources and solutions

THE UNFAO’s Fuelwood Program said 43 percent of the Philippine rural population depend on fuelwood for energy but is seldom using other forms of biomass like plant matter and animal wastes.
Until recently, most biomass consumers lived in rural areas. As populations have grown, and the number of trees has decreased, searching for fuelwood has indeed become a demanding task.
In the Cordillera Administrative Region, the Cordillera Ecological Center (CEC) has developed an alternative fuel for cooking from the oil of native tree Pittosporum resineferum.
CEC developed this as the region’s fuelwood supply for rural homes in all six provinces has become so scarce. It is becoming scarcer every day. Creeping deforestation has left many towns with less than 30-percent forest cover.
“The rate of deforestation is much faster than reforestation efforts. In many places, there is no deforestation to speak of,” said Dobbels Wallang CEC’s environment specialist.
To many farmers, collecting firewood was a two-hour task 50 years ago. Today, it is almost an entire day expedition—every day.
“There are less and less dead trees and branches to cut,” Wallang added. “You are lucky if you can bring home a body-load after a day’s hunt,” he added.

Answering with woodlots

Because of the seriousness of the problem, the CEC, is going around the rural areas training farmers on tree raising and tree planting by turning vacant spaces into woodlots.
The project calls for planting fast-growing nitrogen-fixing and multi-use tree species that yield branches fast and cut for firewood.
These include Pinus kesiya, Alnus japonica, Flemingia macrophylla and Calliandra calothyrsus.
More than a hundred woodlots have been established in at least six towns that continuously supply fuel needs of rural homes.
CEC raises yearly thousands of trees that are distributed to farmers groups, schools and civic organizations that help in reforestation efforts through community-based approaches.
In the Cordillera region indigenous forestry practices are being popularized to answer the shortage of fuelwood, such as the muyung or pinugo, lakon or batangan, tayan and lapat.
These are traditionally inherited woodlot properties and are privately owned that serve as primary sources of fuelwood, construction materials, food and medicines.
They are storehouses of flora, containing from 100 to 264 tree and plant species, mainly indigenous, and endemic in the region, 90 percent of which are useful.
https://businessmirror.com.ph/thinning-forests-resulting-in-fuelwood-shortage/

Indigenous women save world’s biodiversity By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

Indigenous women save world’s biodiversity

By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

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September 24, 2018

BAGUIO CITY—Rose Cunningham Kain of the Miskita and Tuapi tribe of Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua personifies what wordsmiths call “forest dweller.”
She depends on the forest for food, water, medicine, clothing, dwelling materials, tools and implements.
The forest is her teacher and book. Her deities are in the forest. She takes care of the forest as it takes care of her.
For centuries, the balance between Kain’s people, culture and forest worked harmoniously. Today, however, the forests are dying and vanishing. And forest dwellers are finding it difficult to save these.
“If the forests die, so will we,” Kain said.
Kain, with 25 other indigenous women from Indonesia, Nepal, Kenya, Peru, Cameroon, Vietnam and the Philippines, are representing their nations to the “Global Conference on Indigenous Women, Climate Change and REDD Plus”  here in Baguio City that was convened by the United Nations (UN)-affiliated Tebtebba Foundation.

Climate-change adaptation

The conference presented researches that bare impacts of climate change on biodiversity, on indigenous women and on the role of women in biodiversity, traditional forest ecosystem and resource management.
Kain, representing the Center for Indigenous Peoples Autonomy and Development of Nicaragua, said the Miskita and Tuapi women are “living encyclopedia” in describing and interpreting the effects of climate change on forests and biodiversity ecosystems.
Their understanding deals with their belief systems and enables them to practice coping mechanisms like establishing buffer zones that will not be touched by anyone in  the forest.
Indigenous knowledge has been helpful as the spirituality of the people manifested itself in conceptions, relations and conservation of trees and plants, as well as in practices employed in observing social festivities, such as tree planting for every birth of a new-born child, Kain described.
These reflect the indigenous Nicaraguan women’s rich knowledge and deep relationship with land and nature as they observe the climate changes through the years.

Erosion of values result to forest destruction

Indigenous Nicaraguan women are rooted in the notion of Yamni Iwanka, a belief that the erosion of values and responsibility over nature and over ambition to extract from nature have resulted to climate change.
The change in the values toward nature arises from the increasing monetization of the local economy, the Nicaraguan women believe, adding that traditional knowledge, values and practices should be restored and further built upon to restore the communities’ resilience against unpredictable climate-change impacts for present and future generation.
Such worldview is shared by spiritual believers in the universe who consider ecology and spirituality, in God, as overlapping, and that there is a need to treat all creation as sacred because the living human spirit is interconnected to all creation as stewards, not destroyers.
As such, the Nicaraguan women rely on Pana-pana Bahaknu, a traditional system of mutual help in carrying out protection and conservation activities of their forests and biodiversity like tree-planting, putting out forest fires, firewood gathering and collection of nonwood forest products like honey, rattan and wild foods.

Western form of conservation threatening forests

Conference participant Lele Wal from Cameroon lamented that industrial indiscriminate logging and exclusive conservation projects in her country have destroyed traditional way of life, particularly those of the Chaka pygmies’ sustainable hunting and gathering practices.
She claimed these have exacerbated the impacts of climate change, explaining that Pygmies have been displaced from their forests by government and conservation authorities, who look at biodiversity conservation without the pygmies.
From a hunting-gathering culture, the pygmies are pushed to live by the roadside to a semi-sedentary lifestyle. They have to learn to do crop domestication in order to survive as they are curtailed from doing their traditional hunting and gathering practices in the Congo forest, their traditional home territory.
What is disgusting is that while the Pygmies were pushed out, the Congo forest was opened to loggers who cut anything they put a price on, ignorant that some plants and small creatures are dependent on these trees.
It is resulting in species loss, aggravated by climate-change impact like less rains and increasing warm temperature for longer lengths and long dry seasons.
As a consequence of logging the Congo forest, Wal said water supply to rivers, streams and ponds of the forest have gone down, making extinct the most common edible fish, called Nbwakkah, last seen in 1997. The fish is also used in pygmy women’s rite of passage to womanhood.
When the hunter-gathering pygmies were present in the forest, the ecological balance in the Congo was sustained, Wal added.
The Pygmies believe that the disappearance of the trees and fish is a sign of wrath of Komba (god) against the government and loggers. They believe Komba is telling them to plant trees and Raffia palm trees, which they have started doing.

Putting forests in the hands of the people

Nepali conference attendees bared success stories when forests were placed in the hands of the people. And that women are not only helpless victims of climate change but rather powerful agents of change.
Tsering Sherpa, representing the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities, bared that Gurung and Bhujet indigenous women and their families are benefiting greatly from the Kassur and Kalleri forests because women are fighting for their rights and privileges.
The two forests, created under the Community Forest Act of Nepal, placed most forests under the management of communities. Thus, the forests became centers of spirituality and respected. Groves of trees were considered sacred and protected.
Women plant trees, and spices, berries, nuts alongside and beneath the trees. They do bush clearing collect dirt, while men are in charge of cutting branches and selective tree felling.
Women have positions in the tree committees and can influence decision-making on critical issues about the forest because they asserted their rights.
Tsering disclosed, however, that despite the collective efforts of women to preserve their forests, climate-change impact has lessened food production in the region because of erratic rainfall and the disappearance of snowcap in their mountains that feed rivers of the forests.
This led the community people to plant crops that require less water, especially native seed varieties, collected and stored by women, that have long adapted to the region.

Return to traditional ways

Senjuti Kisa of the Women’s Resource Network of Bangladesh disclosed that in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), climate change is impacting adversely on their jum rice cultivation.
Farmers are getting less rice yield. The forests have less tree species; there is dwindling water supply, longer dry spells, less time for farm work and rapid biodiversity loss.
This has prompted CHT women to revert to common sense and traditional ways. For instance, they avoid harvesting all potato tubers during harvest so as to leave in the ground a tuber for a second or third cropping.
They plant only native banana varieties to avoid diseases, they do not harvest multi-river products, harvesting only crabs or shrimps or fish or shells one at a time and never altogether. They  strongly suggest to men not to cut trees less than 50 years old.
What are common among these experiences are the depletion, erosion and extinction of not only genetic material, and biodiversity but also knowledge, values and norms that govern natural resources management in the face of worsening climate-change impacts.
It is aggravated by multiple interacting factors like state laws, profit-oriented economic development, exclusive forest conservation schemes and creeping globalization.
Some 1.6 billion people worldwide depend on varying degrees on forests for livelihood. The world’s population of around 7 billion rely on biodiversity for existence, but only several thousand indigenous women are really on the ground protecting and conserving these.
These women need help but may have to contend on the problem alone for the moment. Most of the world’s humans are busy destroying what is left of biodiversity.
https://businessmirror.com.ph/indigenous-women-save-worlds-biodiversity/

Contributions of Pine Trees to the Philippine Environment

Contributions of Pine Trees to the Philippine Environment
By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan
Once again, as we face the coming of Christmas, the most memorable holiday in the Christian calendar, the image of pine trees comes vividly in our minds.

In the Philippines, the most notable is the Benguet pine tree (Pinus kesiya) often referred to as Cordillera pine because the tree grows not only in Benguet but also throughout the Cordillera range covering Mountain Province, Ifugao, Kalinga, Nueva Vizcaya, Abra, including Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur.

Pinus kesiya is endemic in the Cordillera region, a relative of the Khasya pines of the Khasya region in Burma. Pine trees in the Cordillera region are the standard-bearers of the Philippine mountain skyline.

The natural range of the pines is enormous. If anything, they favor rugged conditions, from the ecotome of Mount Pulag’s mossy montane forests, to the dipterocarp skyline of Balbalasang, the waterless and extremely exposed rocky crevices of Sagada, the clayey subsoils of Solsona, to the rocky domes high above where there seems to be no soil at all in Mount Santo Tomas.

If pine trees have a headquarters in our era, it is in Benguet and Mountain Province, whose tropical highlands they seem to relish. With their evolutionary tactics of self-pollination and interbreeding, they keep botanists, tree lovers and tree planters busier there than anywhere else in the region.
Pinus kesiya, ever proud and conquering, is symbol of the Cordillera peoples. Whether blanketed in lush cloaks of vibrant green or stripped naked with only their bare trunks remaining, they reveal their beauty throughout the warmest, wettest or rainiest seasons. Their knowledge of time, history and events is timeless and though science, technology and capitalism seem to have combined to end their reign, they continue to remain.

So What Do the Pine Trees Do?
On the surface, what most people see is the economic side of pine trees—lumber for housing, furniture and buildings. Very few are aware of the ecological, social, medical and cultural contributions of pine trees.

As food, pine trees seem unimportant to humans except for birds, insects and a few animals. While some pine tree species’ have seeds big enough to eat, Pinus kesiya’s seeds are, although edible, too small to really satisfy human hunger. Only the Lebanese pine, Korean and Pinon pine have seeds big enough to be harvested for food.

But the trees are more important for something else. There are four direct and uncontested facts that the pine trees do for the Philippine environment. First, the trees help directly contribute to oxygen supply to the environment for humans to breathe, directly affecting local and regional air quality by altering the urban atmospheric environment.

Humans breathe only oxygen which comprises 21 percent of our atmosphere. But oxygen in many parts of the world is being depleted due to pollution wherein dangerous methane, sulphur and nitrous oxides and CO2 and smog are increasing in the air. Trees supply about 70 percent of our oxygen supply.

Second, they provide water, absorbing as much as 150 liters per mature tree each year which they release slowly to recharge brooks, springs, rivers and ponds. Three of the nation’s biggest mega-dams, San Roque, Ambuklao and Binga generating a combined 1,200 megawatts of hydroelectric power—get their water from pine forests of Benguet and Mountain Province.

Third, the pine trees prevent soil erosion and landslides in the region, serving as the main soil cover thereby protecting soil loss. The Cordillera region losses some 100,000 tons of topsoil every year, without the pine trees soil loss would be worse affecting adversely agriculture, settlements, properties and lives.

Fourth, pine trees lower temperature. When Baguio had more pine trees, the city was cooler; it deserved to be called the “City of Pines”. Today, the city is not only warm, congested and dirty but also dubbed by World Bank as having one of the cities in the world with the “dirtiest air” as thousands of trees were allowed by the city government to be cut to give way to commercial and residential buildings, roads, tourism and hotels.

Oxygen Supply and CO2 Absorption
One mature pine tree, ten years and above, releases 45 lbs of oxygen a year. At least four trees can supply the oxygen requirement of one human each year.

As pine trees release oxygen, they absorb CO2, a dangerous greenhouse gas. Each mature pine tree absorbs 45 lbs of CO2, following physics’ Boyle’s law of “what element is lost is equally replaced by another element”.

The oxygen released by the millions of pine trees affect air by reducing temperature, remove smog and air pollutants, CO2, methane, sulphur and nitrous oxides thereby regulating microclimatic effects like cooling.

Pine Trees Lower Temperature
Clumps of pine trees and all trees for that matter reduce mid-day temperature from a minimum of 0.2 degrees C to 1.3 degrees C some 1.5 meters to 2.4 meters above ground.

Below individual and small fragments of pine trees over grass, mid-day air temperatures can be reduced to as low as 0.7C to 1.3C degrees cooler than in any open area.

When pine trees respire, they emit oxygen which do not only reduce air temperature, but also absorb radiation and store heat. They also reduce relative humidity, turbulence, and surface albedo of concrete. These changes in local meteorology alter pollution concentrations in urban areas.

Removal of Air Pollutants
Even though pine trees leaves are needle-type, they function as normally as a broadleaf. The needles through their stomata, remove deadly gaseous air pollution primarily by uptake.

Once inside the leaf, gases diffuse into intercellular spaces and may be absorbed by water films to form acids or react with inner-leaf surfaces. The trees also remove pollution by intercepting airborne particles. Most particles like CO2 are absorbed into the tree, and eventually stored in the soil by the roots.

Some particles that are intercepted are retained on the plant surface. These are resuspended to the atmosphere, washed off by rain, or dropped to the ground with leaf and twig falls. Consequently, vegetation is only a temporary retention site for many atmospheric particles.

Reducing Urban Island Phenomenon and Temperature on Buildings
Urban Island phenomenon is the heat transferred from cities via highway and roads to outlying communities. Pine tree reduce this, as well as lessen building energy use by lowering temperatures and shading buildings during the summer, and blocking winds during rainy season. When building energy use is lowered, pollutant emissions from power plants are also lowered.

The cumulative and interactive effects of trees on meteorology, pollution removal, and power plant emissions determine the overall impact of trees on air pollution.

Energy and Medical Relevance
Pine trees are the most popular among all conifers in the world, the most widespread, most varied and most valuable trees of their order. The biggest family of conifers goes by their name, the Pinaceae.
Pine trees are called pine trees basically because it contains the rare and highly expensive Alpha e-pinene chemical content that the tree treasures. E-pinene  contains an important hydro-carbon alkane, the chemical used for lighting and cooking in high altitudes and also ingredient for pharmaceuticals and chemical necessities.

The chemical is contained in the resin of the pine tree which explains why pine wood is highly flammable. The indigenous Cordillera tribes make use of resin-rich pine wood as flint or for starting fires called locally “saleng”.

Pine Trees and the Joy of Christmas
There was a time when pine trees were favorite trees cut for Christmas trees. Today, cutting a pine tree is a crime. But pine trees still exude mixed joy on Christmas especially to children. Thousands travel every Christmas to Baguio City and other places in the Cordillera region just to see pine trees.
To any young child who sees a small young pine tree, if anything, he/she is fascinated with joy to reach out and touch the vigorous plant-- fantastically rich in its detail, with its thick and sappy shoots bristling, bright new needles, embossed with male and female parts of splendidly original and suggestive design-- inviting kids to dapple them.

The trees’ genus Pinus is the pine proper, limited to 100 or so species all over the world, with certain clear and obvious characteristics, of which the easiest to see and remember is the relatively long evergreen needles.

The pine needles and cones are the ones that easily lure people on Christmas time. Pinus kesiya has three needles for each fascicle. The yearly growth of each shoot of a pine needle takes the form of a ‘candle’, which is a defiance of gravity.

The needles are boiled as tea and drank to cure upper respiratory tract ailments. Medical experts recommend to asthma victims to walk under pine trees in the morning because the trees release terpenes which help cleanse the lungs.

Thanking the Pine Trees
To give thanks to the pine trees for their ecological, social, cultural, economic and aesthetic benefits, the environmental group Cordillera Ecological Center conducts yearly the Pine Tree Festival. Already on its fourth year, educational, cultural, music and arts activities by representatives from Baguio city, Benguet, Mountain Province, Abra, Kalinga and Apayao. It attracts thousands of tourists.

Most importantly, it advocates and leads numerous tree planting activities.
Next time you find yourself walking underneath pine stands, woods or forests, look up. Not many people embrace this view high above our limited ground floor. An awakening and soul-changing world is gifted by a simple tilt of the head as you see the sky through a beautifully complicated and tangled web of pine trees.

That gives life.

Stillness of Time

Stillness of Time
....michael a. bengwayan

The walk to the mountain was worth it. I am on the zenith overlooking La Trinidad and part of Baguio City. Yonder, the coast of La Union seemed nearer than real. Soaked in sweat, breathing hard, I count my heavy pants. My legs yearned to be stretched. Age is fast catching up. Everything is still in front of me, except for a lonely cricket chirping, a step away, visible under the grass blades bending to adore earth. The empty expanse of space in front of me is inhabited by a lone, sun gliding swallow, wishing for the last rain, that may never come. Even the hopper doesn’t move. Far in the distance, the fading blue of the sea reflects to the sky, misleading, deceiving. The sky is a colorless space. The air molecules, yes oxygen, shine, sun lit to iridescent powder blue, taking form like a large fat fan covering space.

On the horizon, smaller hills proud of their skyline fill the lower fringes, royals, ceruleans, hints of purples and grays. Only the wind moves slightly, giving the colors more definition. I can see a ship or what appears to be a ship, on the point of empty hibernation. The shoreline is white, an artist's wavy stroke. It just lies there, waiting to melt, and then reformed by onrushing waves

Around me, just blades of grass and yes, the pine. They will be there forever. They may look lonely and unattached; each one motionless and green, They calm the spirit.,

Stillness is all I see as I view this sunset in one of its bests.. Stillness is all I feel. It is a different kind of calm for me – more pronounced than when I take quiet moments in my world of motion. This is quiet that permeates from the outside in; born from the stillness of the scene. Nothing moves except that pine needles in the distance and the solitary swallow who takes flight every now and then. My insides feel the change. They have been tranquilized naturally, just by being present here. I too have been slowed, by age, much to my great surprise. Not fond of warm weather, I usually contract and withdraw from the elements. I realize that in doing so, I’ve missed opportunities to be quieted by the cold landscape, from the outside in. But now I know.

Indigenous Women Save World’s Biodiversity in the Midst of Climate Change

Indigenous Women Save World’s Biodiversity in the Midst of Climate Change

By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

Rose Cunningham Kain, of the Miskita and Tuapi tribe of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, personifies what wordsmiths call “forest dweller”.

She depends on the forest for food, water, medicine, clothing, dwelling materials, tools and implements. The forest is her teacher and book. Her deities are in the forest. She takes care of the forest as it takes care of her. 

For centuries, the balance between her people, culture and forest worked harmoniously. Today, however, the forests are dying and vanishing. And forest dwellers are finding it difficult to save these.

“If the forests die, so will we”, Kain said. She with 25 other indigenous women from Indonesia, Nepal, Kenya, Peru, Cameroon, Vietnam and the Philippines, are representing their nations to the “Global Conference on Indigenous Women, Climate Change and REDD Plus”  here in Baguio City, Philippines convened by the United Nations (UN)-affiliated Tebtebba Foundation.

Climate Change Adaptation

The conference presented researches baring impacts of climate change on biodiversity, on indigenous women and on the role of women in biodiversity, traditional forest ecosystem and resource management.

Kain, representing the Center for Indigenous Peoples Autonomy and Development of Nicaragua said the Miskita and Tuapi women are “living encyclopedia” in describing and interpreting the effects of climate change on forests and biodiversity ecosystems. Their understanding deal with their belief systems and enable them to practice coping mechanisms like establishing buffer zones that will not be touched by anyone in  the forest .

Indigenous knowledge has been helpful as the spirituality of the people manifested itself in conceptions, relations and conservation of trees  and plants as well as in practices employed in observing social festivities such as tree planting for every birth of a new-born child, Kain described.

These reflect the indigenous Nicaraguan women’s rich knowledge and deep relationship with land and nature as they observe the climate changes through the years.

Erosion of Values Result to Forest Destruction

Indigenous Nicaraguan women are rooted in the notion of Yamni Iwanka, belief that the erosion of values and responsibility over nature and over-ambition to extract from nature have resulted to climate change.

The change in the values towards nature arises from the increasing monetization of the local economy, the Nicaraguan women believe, adding that traditional knowledge, values and practices should be restored and further built upon to restore communities’ resilience against unpredictable climate change impacts for present and future generation.

Such worldview  is shared by spiritual believers in the universe who consider ecology and spirituality (in God) as overlapping, and that there is a need to treat all creation as sacred because the living human spirit is interconnected to all creation as stewards, not destroyers.

As such, the Nicaraguan women rely on Pana-pana Bahaknu, a traditional system of mutual help in carrying out protection and conservation activities of their forests and biodiversity like tree-planting, putting-out forest fires, firewood gathering and collection of non-wood forest products like honey, rattan and wild foods.

Western Form of Conservation Threatening Forests

Conference participant Lele Wal from Cameroon lamented the fact that industrial indiscriminate logging and exclusive conservation projects in her country have destroyed traditional way of life, particularly those of the Bhaka pygmies’ sustainable hunting and gathering practices.

She claims these have exacerbated the impacts of climate change, explaining Pygmies have been displaced from their forests by government and conservation authorities who look at biodiversity conservation without the Pygmies.

From a hunting-gathering culture, the Pygmies are pushed to live by the roadside to a semi-sedentary lifestyle.  They have to learn to do crop domestication in order to survive as they are curtailed from doing their traditional hunting and gathering practices in the Congo forest, their traditional home territory.

What is disgusting is while the Pygmies were pushed out; the Congo forest was opened to loggers who cut anything they put a price on, ignorant that some plants and small creatures are dependent on these trees.

It is resulting to species loss, aggravated by climate change impact like less rains and increasing warm temperature for longer lengths and long dry seasons.

 As a consequence of logging the Congo forest,, Wal said  water supply to rivers, streams and ponds of the forest have gone down, making extinct the most common edible fish, called Nbwakkah, last seen in 1997. The fish is also used in Pygmy women’s rite of passage to womanhood.

While when the hunter-gathering Pygmies were present in the forest, the ecological balance in the Congo was sustained, Lele Wal added. 

The Pygmies believe that the disappearance of the trees and fish is a sign of wrath of Komba (God) against the government and loggers and they believe Komba is telling them to plant trees and Raffia palm trees, which they have started doing.

Putting Forests in the Hands of the People

In Nepal, Nepali conference attendees bared success stories when forests were placed in the hands of the people. And that women are not only helpless victims of climate change but rather powerful agents of change.

 Tsering Sherpa, representing the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities bared Gurung and Bhujet indigenous women and their families are benefitting greatly from the Kassur and Kalleri forests because women are fighting for their rights and privileges.

The two forests, created under the Community Forest Act of Nepal, placed most forests under the management of communities. Thus, the forests became centers of spirituality and respected. Groves of trees were considered sacred and protected. 

Women plant trees, spices, berries, nuts alongside and beneath the trees. They do bush clearing collect dirt while men are in charge of cutting branches and selective tree felling.

Women have positions in the tree committees and can influence decision-making on critical issues about the forest because they asserted their rights.

Tsering disclosed however, that despite the collective efforts of the women to preserve their forests, climate change impact has lessened food production in the region because of erratic rainfall and the disappearance of snowcap in their mountains that feed rivers of the forests.

This led the community people to plant crops that require less water, especially native seed varieties, collected and stored by women, that have long adapted to the region.

Return to Traditional Ways

Senjuti Kisa of the Women’ Resource Network of Bangladesh disclosed that in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), climate change is impacting adversely on their jum rice cultivation.  Farmers are getting less rice yield. The forests have less tree species; there is dwindling water supply, longer dry spells, less time for farm work and rapid biodiversity loss.

This has prompted CHT women to revert to common sense and traditional ways. For instance, they avoid harvesting all potato tubers during harvest so as to leave in the ground a tuber for a 2^nd or 3^rd cropping. 

They plant only native banana varieties to avoid diseases, they do not harvest multi river denizens, harvesting only crabs or shrimps or fish or shells one at a time and never altogether. They  strongly suggest to men not cut trees less than 50 years old.

What are common among these experiences are the depletion, erosion and extinction of not only genetic material, and biodiversity but also knowledge, values and norms that govern natural resources management in the face of worsening climate change impacts.

It is aggravated bymultiple interacting factors like state laws, profit-oriented economic development, exclusive forest conservation schemes and creeping globalization.

Some 1.6 billion people worldwide depend on varying degree on forests for livelihood, around 7 billion people, the world’s population, rely on biodiversity for existence but only several thousand indigenous women are really on the ground protecting and conserving these. 

These women need help but may have to contend on the problem alone for the moment. Most of the world’s humans are busy destroying what is left of biodiversity. 

Help may never come.