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Contact Us:
Gov. Joey Sarte Salceda
Green Economist
Manuel Nong C. Rangasa
Executive Director-CIRCA
Mobile: +63.906.333.9400
Telefax: +63.52.480.3649
Email: info@albaycirca.org
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| World Environment Day Speech |
A Call to Build Capacities to Combat Global Warming
We will be celebrating World Environment Day three days from now in the horrific context of the second deadliest cyclone in recent history and a 7.9 earthquake in Western China.
And right here at home, we had a mid-May typhoon that ravaged La Union, Zambales and Pangasinan - provinces just a bus ride from this chamber. Close to 50 people had been reported killed. Damage to infrastructure and crops was massive.
It has been this way for years. The planet with a gentle and kind temperament, though with occasional outburst of rage, is a thing of the past.
Even in the idyllic parts of the United States, the picture-perfect little house on the prairie is more likely to be ravaged by tornadoes and thunderstorms than swept by the bliss of spring and the gaiety of summer.
Much as we long for the less portentous World Environment Day celebrations of the past, those joyful affairs, attended by the usual parades, pageantry and speeches - we can't.
Much as we want to play down the agony and the horror in the disaster-stricken areas and say that nature is entitled to a display of occasional lethal tantrums, we can't.
Much as we want to deny the extremism of climatic patterns, we can't.
Footage after footage from recent disaster scenes from Burma to Western China to West Luzon – are all too jarring and unnerving.
So are the statistics on death and destruction.
In Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta, the area hardest hit by Cyclone Nargis, no one is left to bury the dead in communal graves.
Ponds, rivers and paddies are overflowing with the rotting corpses of the cyclone victims. The figures on the number of fatalities vary, from the 78,000 officially recorded by the Myanmar government, to the 200,000 dead and missing tallied by the international aid and relief agencies.
Those who survived are in refugee camps. Or atop rooftops, waiting for rescue helicopters that may never come.
Relief workers say they are faced with the largest international relief effort in 30 years with at least 2.5 million cyclone victims without adequate food, clothing and medicine. The rich delta that used to provide rice and sustenance to Myanmar is now a watery graveyard.
The Sichuan earthquake is the deadliest and strongest earthquake to hit China since the 1976 Thangshan earthquake, which left 250,000 dead.
Close to 15,000 fatalities have been reported--more are believed buried under the massive rubble. The number of missing is estimated at 100,000 people.
Entire townships have been flattened by the powerful quake that was felt in Vietnam, Thailand and Pakistan. Survivors are mourning their missing next of kin. Hope that they will be rescued is fast fading.
Mother Nature, the great nurturer, is now an unforgiving destroyer.
There are major characteristics to this inexorable march of nature to sustained tempest and turbulence. One is extremism, as in nature run amok. Also, present-day disasters and extreme weather shifts target just about every corner of the planet with ferocity and impunity.
The granite-solid parts of the Arctic -- said to be indestructible and there for life – are melting. In the heart of the tropics, cyclones create mass graves and ghost towns out of peaceful, thriving communities.
Why is nature running amok?
The answer is climate change. And in this season of celebrating World Environment Day, climate change should be declared as the greatest scourge of our generation.
Clashing civilizations can forge amity and come to peace. Religious and ethnic strife can find resolution.
Wars end. Guns are stilled. Swords are fashioned into plowshares.
There is always a term limit to discord among races and creed. But climate change is a problem of another kind.
It is a multi-headed hydra, manifesting its destructive power in cyclones and tsunamis, in droughts, in massive flooding, in snow-less winters, in summers of baking heat, in the wild and erratic climate shifts.
Its destructive powers are whimsical, ungoverned by rules; they leap across territorial boundaries and are without limitation.
A manifestation of the widespread and unsettling impact of climate change is the current global food crisis, a climate change-induced global emergency.
According to the World Food Program, over 100 million people from across the globe are threatened by the silent tsunami of hunger. Food riots had toppled the government of Haiti, where hungry and desperate people have been forced to eat baked mud laced with little amounts of flour and sugar.
The Philippines has roiled the global grains market by posting the biggest rice import orders in history.
Tenders for premium rice have breached the $1,000 per metric ton price.
Other basic food commodities are now being sold at record-high prices, shutting out much of the developing world from the global food trade and plunging their citizens deeper into hunger and desperation.
Some knee-jerk reactions to the food crisis involved clear-cutting forest areas to expand the arable lands for food production and intensifying chemical-based farming. These further upset the environmental equilibrium, which in turn abet climate change.
The desperate efforts to ease the food crisis further aggravate the despoliation of the environment and intensify climate change. The search for solutions ultimately creates bigger problems.
And when food shortages and skyrocketing food prices plague disaster-stricken areas such as Myanmar, the double-whammy creates problems of impossible scope and magnitude.
Climate change is a man-made monster. Cavalier, wanton and reckless use of fossil fuel and the clear-cutting of irreplaceable forest resources have conspired with weak environmental policies to push our planet nearer to an environmental holocaust.
Worse, much of the developed world was in a state of denial on the issue of climate change for decades and this upset the environmental equilibrium even further. Even sections of the scientific community called climate change a hoax or non-life threatening.
The multi-headed hydra is a parasite that feeds on the wastefulness, complacency, indifference and weakness of its host. This parasite will overpower mankind; even put an end to life as we know it, unless it is purged.
What man's folly had created, man's sense of survival and sense of purpose have to reverse. Before it is too late.
And in the Philippine context, we are doing just that.
In Albay, climate-proofing of small farms through agro-forestry, will start soon.
The proponent, Dr. Rodel D. Lasco of the World Agro-Forestry Centre is an IPCC expert and lead author and a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize of former US Vice President Al Gore.
Under the program which I fully support, 500 small farmers will plant forest trees between their crops to climate-proof their farms and help sequester carbon emissions.
Good practices in climate adaptation will be taught to the farmers so they will fully understand and appreciate the pioneering environmental effort.
Dr. Lasco hopes that after the success of the Albay experiment, the program can be adopted by small farmers across the country that have been identified as most vulnerable to climate-related hazards.
Three carbon sequestration projects, covering a total area of 5,000 hectares, will also be carried out in ideal sites in the country's three major regions – Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. The projects, which shall benefit 7,500 small farmers, have been programmed to capture 102,410 tons carbon dioxide equivalent per year with a potential value of US$512,048. In the areas to be reforested by the carbon sequestration projects, the rehabilitation of precious watershed areas is also expected.
Dr. Lasco and a colleague, Dr. Florencia Pulhin, are the program proponents. I am an enthusiastic supporter of the carbon sequestration project.
I am also helping develop a new template for re-greening Philippine highways and roadways, another effort to mitigate the hazards of climate change.
A forest garden will be developed along the STAR Tollway in Brgy. Trapiche, Tanauan City, which hopefully will be the first of several efforts to improve the landscape design of our major road networks and highways. The ecological, economic, and educational gains of the community from such a basic initiative will be enormous.
The Luntiang Pilipinas project, which I started several years back, is building a national nursery at Los Banos in Laguna in partnership with the Bureau of Plant Industry. Antique and Iloilo will also benefit from municipal nurseries the Luntian will fund and support.
The infrastructure of any tree planting effort starts with the availability of materials to plant. Propagation of indigenous planting materials, including our precious dipterocarps, fruit trees, even our native vegetables and medicinal plants, is now being intensified by
Luntiang Pilipinas.
From these materials we shall restore our tropical forests; urban tree parks will sprout like oases in the cities; and our communities will have fresh, nutritious food.
This is nothing new, however.
Haribon has successfully collaborated with Antique, Bukidnon and Sablayan communities in "rainforestation farming". Indigenous trees and fruit trees and some crop plants were planted to restore deforested areas. Drs. Milan and Margraf in a 1994 study at Leyte State University concluded that a farming system in the humid tropics is increasingly more sustainable the closer it is in its species composition to the original local rainforest.
More recently, a Biodiversity Research Center was set up in Bilar, Bohol by the Soil and Water Conservation Foundation. It demonstrates various terrestrial environments and applications for restoration of natural forests and farming lands.
The Center boasts of an indigenous tree nursery, a dipterocrop hedge garden, a rainforestation area, a karst education trail and a training center. With the Rajah Sikatuna Protected Landscape, the caves, and the river nearby, the Center also promotes eco-tours for additional income for the communities.
Funds for these projects were authorized by the US Tropical Forest Conservation Act of 1998. That law allows debt relief for developing countries if the funds will be used to aid local forest conservation activities.
It is with particular attention that I watch how the scheme is being adapted to Philippine needs and conditions because during the state visit to Washington, D.C. in 2001, I spoke with US Secretary Powell about how we might benefit from it. The Philippine Tropical Forest Conservation Foundation administers the fund.
In selected areas of Cebu, the Million Mangroves Project which PTFCF also supports, is ongoing. It aims to protect the communities from climate impacts and to rejuvenate the fishing industry.
Closer to this chamber along the Bay, dynamite and other forms of illegal fishing and water pollution killed the thriving fishing industry of the coastal barangays of Rosario in Cavite.
Today, the local organization of fisherfolk, the Rosario Multi-purpose and Development Cooperative, and partners Yes2Life and HWK Foundations are engaged in a novel experiment to revive the fish habitat: Reef structures are made out of organic material through a simple technology taught to them by HWKF and dropped into the “reforestation” area in Manila Bay.
The fishermen visited us two weeks ago with the good news: The fish have indeed come back.
They watch their underwater garden and the hundreds of fish that have returned using a robot made by local students. The Mayor of Rosario has formally adopted the project. Soon, the fishing grounds will be revived; there will be no need for small boats to go out to sea just to catch fish.
Rosario is showing the way, albeit unintentionally, for coastal areas threatened by coral reef bleaching due to climate change.
At the level of legislation, Mr. President, I am now asking my colleagues to help me secure the speedy passage of a pending bill which seeks the creation of a Climate Change Commission. This measure is as vital as bills on anti-poverty, economic reconstruction and national security.
The proposed Climate Change Commission will elevate climate change issues – and their attendant hazards and risks – into the top rank of government priority.
The ground level work for climate-proofing and carbon sequestration and the parallel environmental initiatives at the Senate may not get screaming headlines and the attention of the pundits.
But they represent sincere and viable anti-dotes to the greatest scourge of our generation. They are big, determined steps for the survival of humankind.
There are firm plans to host an Asia-Pacific Conference on Climate Change Adaptation in Manila late this year with this representation as co-convenor. The Province of Albay, the first LGU in Southeast Asia to champion climate change adaptation, will convene the Conference in coordination with UN/ESCAP.
With the theme "Local Governments Take the Lead", the conference aims to harness the immense resources of local governments and their partners by forging a network and cooperation framework in preparation for the 14th Conference of the Parties in December.
On this season we celebrate World Environment Day, the minutes and the
hours on the global environmental clock are all ticking to sunset.
Let us all work to reverse this and usher in the morning in our planet.
Thank you and good day.
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