Alvarez is GMA new adviser on climate change

MANILA, Philippines – President Arroyo has named former senator Heherson Alvarez as her presidential adviser on global warming and climate change.

Alvarez, who also served as environment and natural resources secretary, is affiliated with various organizations related to the environment.

As chairman of the Senate committee on environment, Alvarez organized the first conference on global warming and climate change in Asia.

The Manila Declaration, crafted during the conference, took full cognizance of the extreme vulnerability of archipelagic and island countries to sea level rise and changes in weather conditions that result from global warming and climate change.

Alvarez was also credited for bringing together the country’s three major oil companies in signing the Healthy Air Pact, which removed lead in gasoline and reduced the sulfur content in diesel.

He is founding chairman of the EarthSavers Movement and a founding member of the Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE), a group of environmental lawmakers co-founded by then United States Senator Al Gore.

Alvarez now sits as vice president for Southeast Asia of the London-based Advisory Committee on the Protection of the Seas.

“With the potentially disastrous combination of short time-scale global warming and long time-scale of climate change and the rising food and fuel prices, in-country coordination and global cooperation must be strategically systematized,” Alvarez said in a statement.

Alvarez said local mitigation programs can enable the country to cut back on the use of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. “We must now build the institutional and material infrastructure for our own self-defense with the rest of mankind,” he said.

The problem of global warming and climate change has become a priority of the administration. – Marvin Sy, Katherine Adraneda