Philippines environment department to provide mangrove saplings

DENR 7 to provide mangrove saplings
The Visayan Daily Star Negros Oriental 10 Dec 13;

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Region 7 will provide mangrove seedlings and saplings to local government units in Central Visayas to protect coasts from storm surges, a government press release said.

DENR 7 regional executive director Isabelo Montejo said LGUs that want to help plant mangroves should coordinate with their Community Environment and Natural Resources Office for seedlings and saplings.

He added the DENR will help identify suitable planting sites for mangroves.

He said that typhoon “Yolanda” has taught a lesson that storm surges could happen and have devastating effects to communities and coastlines. “It is high time that we reflect on the degraded coastal forest and how we could regenerate it through mangrove reforestation to make our coastlines less vulnerable to extreme weather events, Montejo said in the press release.

He said storm surges, or sea waters carried or lifted by strong winds to engulf coastal areas, occurred in Tacloban City and Dulag town in Leyte; Guiuan, Llorente and Balangiga towns in Eastern Samar; and Basey in Samar at the height of “Yolanda” a month ago.

Rep. Benhur Salimbangon (Cebu, 4th District) said Bantayan Island off northern Cebu mainland was fortunate it was not hit by a storm surge because it was low tide at the time the typhoon made landfall.

Montejo said mangroves, ranging from small shrubs to tall trees, thrive in salty environment, are woody and bear seeds called propagules. They grow along sheltered inter-tidal coastlines and in association with estuaries and lagoons, he added.

Aside from protection against several causes of calamities, mangroves can increase food production because it provides nursery grounds for fish, prawns and crabs, and support fisheries production in coastal areas.

Mangroves have extensive rooting structures that slow water movement to trap sediments. Pollutants washed from the land, particularly those that adhered to sediment particles, are filtered and absorbed by mangroves. The trees anchor the soil and absorb and dissipate the energy of the waves, slowing their passage in land, the press release added.*

Viewpoint: ‘Green wall’
Juan L. Mercado Philippine Daily Inquirer 9 Dec 13;

They call it—what? “The green wall,” our banker friend said. He oversees banks in the Visayas. Mangroves in Eastern Samar buffered the storm surge that killed thousands elsewhere, his clients stated.

That’s correct, noted Neil Chatterjee writing for Bloomberg. In Southeast Asia, replanted mangroves are getting credit for protecting communities against tsunamis and supertyphoons such as “Yolanda” in the Philippines. They trim greenhouse gas emissions.

Mangrove regeneration in Northern Samar minimized damage from the Nov. 8 typhoon, Trowel Development Foundation reports. Planting 30 coastal trees, per 100 square meters, may reduce the flow of a tsunami up to 90 percent, the journal Science concludes from a study of the 2004 tsunami that killed 220,000 people in Aceh, Indonesia.

We protected mangroves against illegal cutting, e-mailed Leonardo Rosario, a development consultant on the Northern Samar project. Areas surrounding fish farms were planted with native mangrove species. They buffered residents and fish farms from the brute force of Yolanda.
Mangroves in the Philippines, however, are cut or paved over with concrete at a rate of 1 percent a year. They’re “very much degraded,” notes Daniel Murdiyarso, a forestry scientist at the Bogor, Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research. Indonesia’s mangrove loss is four times higher than the government’s figure.

Had the mangroves in Leyte and Eastern Samar been conserved, the storm surge would have been dissipated by 70 to 80 percent of its strength, Environment Secretary Ramon Paje estimates. The devastation of Tacloban, which faces open seas, was aggravated because no mangroves provided a buffer. Affected coastlines once had extensive mangroves and beach forest areas. But most were converted into squatter settlements, others for projects.

President Aquino directed the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to “earmark P350 million for the restoration of the ‘green wall.’” Priority will focus on Leyte. “Tacloban is a major concern given its being a major population center. But the undertaking will cover practically the entire eastern seaboard of Eastern Visayas,” Paje says.

Mangroves on marine coasts and estuaries may help low-lying coastal areas adapt to rising sea levels, which could uproot 13.6 million Filipinos by 2050, the Asian Development Bank projected in an earlier study titled “Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific.”
Countries like the Philippines must redo earlier estimates of a 20-centimeter rise in sea level. It will probably double. And this threat runs “along the Pacific seaboard: from Samar to eastern Mindanao,” Wendy Clavano wrote in “Environmental Science for Social Change.”

Not everyone agrees. “I’ve been in far too many disaster areas as a member of the Unesco International Tsunami Survey Team,” said Brian McAdoo, professor of science at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. “And I’ve seen too many coastal forests overwhelmed to put much faith in trees being effective defenses against a tsunami.”

Article 51 of the Philippine Water Code (Presidential Decree No. 1067) bars people from building in shores of the seas and lakes throughout their entire length and within a zone of three meters in urban areas. That goes up to 20 meters in agricultural areas and 40 meters in forest areas, “along their margins (and) are subject to the easement of public use in the interest of recreation, navigation, floatage, fishing and salvage.”

But it is a law honored more in the breach than in the observance. Now, the 5,924—and still rising—Yolanda deaths require political reform. “The onus is on local government
officials to restore their mangrove areas and beach forests,” Paje says. It is at the local level where reform takes root or withers.

“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late,” Shakespeare once said. Yolanda
clobbered us before what the world’s top scientist on mangroves has been insisting all along started to sink in.

She is a Filipino, Time Magazine pointed out. In its 2008 cover story on 100 of the world’s top environmental scientists, Time reported about Jurgenne Primavera, former senior scientist at Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center in Panay, campaigning to protect mangrove forests that act as a crucial buffer zone between land and sea.

Roughly a fourth of mangrove forests here have disappeared since 1980. Time’s Hanna Beech noted in her report on Primavera: One of aquafarming’s side effects is to wreck mangroves—a plant network that sponges nasty effluents and are a barricade against typhoons and tsunamis. The propensity to introduce exotic seafood species into local habitats—as opposed to farming native species—can also badly damage delicate ecosystems.

Save some mangroves so aquaculture flourishes sustainably, Primavera urges in the just-published “Manual on Community-based Mangrove Rehabilitation.” Backed by the Zoological Society of London, the book distills lessons from rearing 58,000 seedlings of a dozen mangrove species in on-site nurseries. Some, 100,000 wildings and nursery seedlings were planted by 4,000 volunteers from nongovernment organizations, church groups, etc. It stitches biophysical and sociopolitical “do’s and don’ts” when trying to build “a green wall.” As interest in rehabilitating mangroves grows in the wake of the devastation from Yolanda, search the Net for this link: https://www.zsl.org/conservation/regions/asia/mangrove-philippines/iucn-mangrove-specialist-group,2261,AR.html

But then, when did countries ever listen to their own prophets?

Beach forests and greening the Philippines
Jose Rene C. Gayo Business World Online 9 Dec 13;

I HAVE gone to Palawan at least once a month over the past two years. I also get a chance to travel to other parts of the Philippines because of the work I do. Every time I fly over Palawan, I wonder why this province managed to maintain much of its forests. This is a startling contrast to the other parts of the Philippines where one can see bald and cogonal "forest lands."
Of course, we are too familiar with forest on those hills and mountains or at least that is what our mind conjures as images of the forest. But lately, I observed a different type of forest. Maybe it was just the mental images that failed me to see that indeed there is a different type of forest. These are beach forests. These are usually forested by mangroves. In some areas agoho trees are the predominant forest species like those I saw in Real, Quezon; Pundaquit, Zambales; and Agoo, La Union.

The mangroves (nipa, by the way, is also a type of mangrove) are predominant species that usually cover the tidal flat lands and wetlands inland where sea water still manage to penetrate during high tides. Much of our beach forests are now gone, "thanks" to conversion of these tidal areas into fishponds or simply illegal logging for charcoal and wood. I was informed that wood from mangroves have very high BTUs (British Thermal Units) and is therefore a good fuel source. Thus, these were the favorites of olden bakeries that made use of brick ovens or kilns.

ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS
We forgot one important function of these mangrove forests until we saw on TV the killer tsunami that hit Indonesia, Thailand, and India a few years ago. Areas that were protected by mangrove forests suffered little damage compared to those areas exposed to the open sea.

Of late, we have seen in vivid images of the damage wrought by typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan). In one TV report, it was said that the town of McArthur in Eastern Samar suffered less damage because of a mangrove forest in front of it. Just one more proof what these beach forests can do.

Mangroves also function for the maintenance of biodiversity, both on land and in the sea. It harbors many types of birds, insects, and plants. It also functions as a breeding ground for many marine species. If these mangrove forests are located near areas with industrial pollution, they also serve as "cleaners" of dirty water. With the advent of climate change, they also serve as effective carbon sinks that suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it as wood.

With the advent of ecotourism, well managed and preserved mangrove forests have been the attraction for tourists. I have seen this myself in my hometown, Tanjay in Negros Oriental. It was only last year that I had a chance to visit a mangrove forest there because they have built a walkway inside the forest. This has now started to attract tourists to complement the whale and dolphin watching in Bais City.

LAND RECLAMATION
One of the arguments put forward in the debates related to the Reproductive Health Law is that while land is fixed, the population keeps on growing. We can’t increase the size of land in the Philippines. The logic seems right until I saw from the plane on a trip to Palawan how much more land we have if we can reclaim the tidal flats. And nature is doing this for us if we leave the mangroves to thrive. More land can be reclaimed if there is a serious effort to reforest the beaches and tidal flats.

The government’s efforts towards the National Greening Program should include the reforestation and preservation of our beach forests. By enlisting communities in these areas and awarding them with certificates of tenure or community-based forest management agreements, thousands of poor from these fishing villages will be given gainful employment to propagate seedlings, to plant them, and to maintain the trees. Later on, they can also be paid via carbon credits based on the volume of carbon offsets.

What is important here is that government should tap private sector participation in this program since government has a very questionable track record in implementing reforestation programs, much less in guarding our forests. Just take a look at what is happening in Compostela Valley and the other areas in the Philippines struck by killer floods. If the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is doing its job, then the illegal logging would not have happened. It has been mandated to protect, preserve, and enhance the environment including our forests. But all these years, our forests are dwindling, yet hundreds of billions of pesos have been spent for it, including foreign aid money. This is simple proof that the DENR just can’t do this job alone or they have to do things different from what they used to do. Talk about thinking out of the box?

EMPLOYMENT GENERATION
Sustainable forests are working in other countries. It generates billions of dollars for those countries who plant, harvest, and export these products globally. Why can’t the Philippines do it since we are in a tropical country? While it takes 60 to 70 years for a temperate country to harvest its trees, in the Philippines we can do it in eight to 12 years.

I have said it before and say it again. The great disservice to the development of our forest industry is the total log ban. What we need to do is to define which areas are for permanent forests and leaving the rest for production forests. Yet, until today we don’t have a land use policy. It’s about time we enact into law a National Land Use Policy.

There is talk of a Visayas version of a Marshall Plan to help rehabilitate the areas affected by the earthquake and the recent super-typhoon. I hope our government policy makers and private sector groups involved consider a serious reforestation plan for our mountains and beaches (including tidal flats). Such a project can generate thousands of jobs and billions of pesos in potential revenues from tree farming and carbon trading schemes.

(This article reflects the personal opinion of the author and does not reflect the official stand of the Management Association of the Philippines. The author is a member of the MAP Agribusiness and Countryside Development Committee, and is the Project Manager of the Farm Business School project of MAP and the Dean of the MFI Farm Business School. Feedback can be sent to map@globelines.com.ph and renegayo@gmail.com. For previous articles, visit www.map.org.ph.)