In the age of climate change, the Philippines has no option but to go green.
The concept of going green to turn disasters triggered by climate-change impacts into an economic opportunity was aired by Rene Ofreneo, chairman of the research and education committee of the Fair Trade Alliance.
Ofreneo pitched the call to put environmentalism at the center of the national-development vision and programming at a press conference in Quezon City on Friday.
Going green, Ofreneo said will help build the country’s resiliency and chances of survival from the worst impacts of climate change-induced events—such as sea level rise, typhoons, long season of rain, flood and drought—and generate millions of jobs and create livelihood opportunities for the poor who are worst affected by climate change.
“Everything must be put in the context of climate change—[in] agriculture, industry and services,” he said.
He cited the many environmental woes the Philippines is experiencing—such as massive forest degradation, coastal and marine resources destruction leading to biodiversity loss; air and water pollution; soil degradation because of agrichemical agriculture and lately, garbage woes.
The country’s natural forests, he said, are almost gone. From a 90 percent forest cover at the time that the first Spaniard set foot in the Philippines in 1521, only a little over 6 percent remains of the country’s forest covers, citing a study by the Ateneo de Manila University.
Most of the country’s land resources devoted to food production are already unproductive because of chemical poisoning after decades of agrichemical agriculture.
The Philippines is also experiencing a rapid rate of biodiversity loss, continuing degradation of marine and coastal environment, air and water pollution, and a serious garbage problem—all of which are aggravated by climate change.
The victims of all these, he said, are the country’s poor.
Ofreneo, a professor at the University of the Philippines, said going greener builds the country’s resiliency and increases its chances of survival in the face of climate-change impacts.
Climate-change risks, he said, can be effectively reduced through adaptation and anticipation, more than contributing to the global effort to mitigate climate change.
The government, he said, should create jobs through greening programs geared toward the restoration of the environment and community renewal.
Rebuilding and fortifying the environment versus climate change, he said means renewing large forest lands and watersheds; massive coastal and marine resources to replenish, numerous rivers to clean up and rehabilitate, as well as air and water; and mountains of waste to segregate and dispose.
Moreover, it also means vast tracts of “poisoned” land to revive and numerous communities to rebuild nationwide.
“All these means jobs,” he said.
Ofreneo said community renewal alone could create 1 million jobs for the Filipino people.
He said that a decent and sustainable economy should be anchored on inclusive and sustainable industry, agriculture and services, by rethinking economic development by going green.
Considering the depleted natural resources, further using natural resources to push development forward is no longer an option. So is industrialization, primarily because of capital limitations and the impact of increasing the country’s carbon footprint that would only worsen global warming and lead and trigger more climate-change consequences.
Greening focus, on energy, transport, manufacturing, buildings, materials management, retail agriculture and forestry, he said, will help, but the need is to go further by greening the whole economy, which should include industry, agriculture and services through scaling of value chain, value adding and pursuing fair trade.
“We need to re-engineer existing industries to go greener. We should develop green industries,” he said.
For agriculture, he said the way to go is to adopt an integrated approach to agriculture, promote sustainable agriculture and transform small farmers into able leaders who are eco-friendly.
The service industries, he said, should also be transformed into greener ones—through eco-tourism, construction of green buildings and malls, and green fast-food chains.
Fair Trade believes that putting environmentalism at the center of national-development vision and programming is key to addressing the twin challenge of environmental degradation and climate change.
Unfortunately, he said in the 2011-2016 Philippine Development Plan (PDP), the environment is least among the priorities.
While the PDP identified many environmental problems, the adaptation and mitigation measures identified as well as legislative agenda, are not in harmony.
The government, he said, is even confused on what to really do with mining.
And while the PDP declares that the blueprint for development is inclusive, yet, it relies on public-private partnership and conditional cash-transfer programs, which he described as “trickle-down economics” and for the excluded, and would only lead to more borrowings to finance government operations.
The big challenge, he said, is to overhaul the PDP and the budget, underscoring the need to put in place a green development plan by reviewing the mining and resource-extraction program; putting more coherence in adaptation, mitigation, anticipation and renewal measures; implementing and financing programs, such as agrarian reform and organic farming; and stopping the indifference to environment and economy, the unchecked smuggling of second-hand vehicles and goods that is killing local industry and environment.
