Environmental and anti-mining group Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan-PNE) on Wednesday said mining companies are unlikely to adhere to Environment Secretary Roy A. Cimatu’s call for biodiversity integration in their operations.
“There is a natural conflict between exploitation and conservation. The very nature of mining requires massive destruction of the environment, which leads to biodiversity loss,” Clemente Bautista, national coordinator of Kalikasan-PNE, told the BusinessMirror in an interview.
For mining companies to adhere to such policy, Bautista said, Cimatu should put into writing his order by issuing a department or administrative order requiring mining companies to integrate biodiversity in their programs.
Bautista was reacting to a recent policy pronouncement by the DENR chief urging companies to integrate biodiversity protection and conservation in their operations following an international study, which revealed that the Philippines’s main island of Luzon has the highest concentration of mammals in the world.
The 2016 Field Museum of Chicago (FMC) study was cited by Cimatu as the reason for the need for biodiversity integration in mining operations.
“He [Cimatu] should first stop the mining operation in the 23 mines that were recommended for closure by [former Secretary Regina Paz L. Lopez. These areas are environmentally critically areas. [He could] then issue an order to the remaining 18 companies to ensure biodiversity integration,” Bautista told the BusinessMirror in mixed Filipino and English.
The Kalikasan-PNE official, likewise, chided Cimatu for issuing a “press release” without actually doing something about the problems, citing the case of Ipilan Nickel. “I don’t know why the DENR has not filed a case against Ipilan Nickel Corp. months after he ordered the tree-cutting activities within and outside its mining tenement in Brooke’s Point, Palawan, was stopped,” Bautista said.
“It is a national project and the DENR should not let Cenro’s [Community Environment and Natural Resources Office] or Penros [Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Office] to act on violations of this kind of large-scale project,” he added.
Past administrations have tried and failed to “urge” the industry to engage in honest-to-goodness biodiversity conservation to no avail, Bautista said.
Cimatu’s recent statement, he added, reveals his perception of biodiversity conservation as mere “greenwashing” for mining companies to give a “positive image to the general public”.
“Such a perspective fails to grasp the importance of biodiversity conservation in developing related sectors, such as research and development, medical research, and even industrial innovations,” Bautista said.
The FMC study explained that “sky island” habitats provided by the mountains of the Luzon islands led to the flourishing of such a high biological diversity, as species adapt to very specific environments.
The study’s proponents noted that allowing the native forest to regenerate will encourage endemic species, which comprised 95 percent of the FMC study’s 56 newly discovered mammal species, to return to the rehabilitated environment.
Maintaining these pockets of unique habitats will require the extensive rehabilitation of deforested and polluted areas. Extractive, destructive and pollutive projects will be restricted not only for their direct impacts, but for their possible impacts that could travel along the water, air and land pathways.
Considering that the country has 228 key biodiversity areas covering 6,008,813 hectares, it is almost impossible for the current setup and scope of the large-scale mining industry not to overlap with the country’s biodiversity corridors, Bautista said.
The large-scale mining industry, he added, would have to undergo a complete overhaul in its industrial development framework, tenurial instruments, technology, community development and other management practices if we are to “mainstream” biodiversity conservation in the industry.
“Cimatu should immediately enforce the closure, suspension of the big mines until such time when stricter biodiversity conservation regulations are passed and enforced,” Bautista added.
Bautista, likewise, said the DENR should conduct a comprehensive scientific assessment of the extent of damages and current risks presented by the mining industry to the environment and communities.
In doing so, Bautista added the DENR should tap independent experts from academe and civil society coming from different relevant fields of expertise to ensure that the industry will not interfere with the study.
“The comprehensive assessment will guide the country’s judicious utilization of mineral resources based on people’s needs and ecological boundaries,” he said.
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Typical of many anti-business leftist groups posing as environmentalists, Kalikasan only makes generalizations favorable to their side, otherwise, if they had done proper research, they would see that there are responsible mines that not only protect but also promote biodiversity like nature reserves and artificial lakes. Philex Mining has planted 8 million forest and fruit trees, including places that never had trees. But that’s the nature of propaganda: Generalizations are easier than research and more effective at grabbing public attention, even if they are inaccurate.