Candidates urged to support moratorium vs logging

Candidates for senator were urged yesterday by environment advocates to back a suspension of commercial logging in the country to curb climate change.

Clemente Bautista Jr., Kalikasan-Philippine Network for the Environment national coordinator, said the aspirants must lay their platform on the "management" of extreme weather conditions brought about by climate change, especially a moratorium on commercial logging.

"Forests, next to oceans, act as a carbon sink," he said.

"They help generate a liveable air environment by absorbing carbon dioxide emissions, pollutive chemicals in the atmosphere and particulates and release oxygen back into the atmosphere."

Bautista said instituting an "urgent commercial logging moratorium" can be considered as one sure way to avert the impact of climate change in the Philippines.

"Forests play a significant role in moderating the movement of greenhouse gases (GHGs) between land and the atmosphere," he said.

"By supporting policies that protect, preserve, and increase the Philippine’s forest cover, we will be able to partially but significantly mitigate the threats posed by climate change and extreme weather occurrences in this part of the region."

Bautista said the Philippines has an ecosystem that is "archipelagic, generally mountainous and sloping" that maintaining an "ideal forest cover" of at least 54 percent of the country’s total land area, which is around 30 million hectares is important to prevent occurrences of flash floods and landslides.

Maintaining an ideal forest cover would prevent biodiversity loss, he added.

Citing government data, Bautista said the country’s forest cover as of 2003 was at 23.9 percent of the total land area.

The country’s total forest cover was estimated around 20 million hectares, but has now dipped to only 7.17 million hectares, he added.

Bautista said 124 out of the total 154 watershed areas designated by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) are already "in critical state."

"Yet the Arroyo administration continues to promote the wanton extraction of our fast disappearing forest reserves: it has one by one lifted log bans and farmed out commercial logging permits in the form of Timber Licensing Agreements (TLAs) and 23 Integrated Forest Management Agreement (IFMA) permits from January 2001 to 2004," he said.

"IFMAs allow their holders, including private industrial tree plantations, the right to timber and all other forest products in their territories."