ENVIRONMENT Secretary Ramon J.P. Paje said the Aquino administration has put in place long-term measures to counter the effects of climate change, with the benefits to be felt well beyond President Aquino’s term.
According to Paje, the massive restoration of watersheds will strengthen the country’s natural defense against calamities. He also said the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is stepping up the completion of the nationwide geohazard mapping to come up with more detailed maps to aid various stakeholders in preparing disaster-risk-reduction-and-management plans.
The geohazard maps, he said, indicate areas susceptible to landslides and floods, which could save for the government time and money in implementing recovery and rehabilitation programs that may be brought about by natural calamities and poor geologic planning.
He noted that one of the biggest costs the government faces is rehabilitation. But these costs, he said, can be avoided.
“If we have good plans, we need not invest in areas which will be affected by landslides,” he said, citing the Guinsaugon tragedy. “Had we had a good plan at the time, we would have not built school in the areas, which will be covered by landslide and cause 300 casualties.”
The DENR, through the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB), he said, is close to completing more detailed geohazard maps at a scale of 1:10,000, which is better than the existing 1:50,000 geohazard maps.
It was learned that geohazard maps for 131 of the 171 total number of cities and municipalities affected by Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan) have been made available as of October.
The DENR-MGB is tasked to come up with geohazard maps nationwide.
To boost the country’s natural defense and strengthen the resilience of communities prone to natural calamities, Paje said the government is focused on rehabilitating degraded watersheds.
“Basically, this is part of a bigger program of restoring the integrity of our natural ecosystem,” he said.
According to Paje, watersheds are the country’s main defense against climate change.
Paje earlier told the BusinessMirror that the DENR will come up with a comprehensive characterization and rehabilitation plan for the country’s 18 major river basins, underscoring the importance of protecting the source of water while conducting various programs to rehabilitate their tributaries.
“We really have to restore it [watersheds] because we have to improve what we call the natural water-holding capacity and we also have to fortify our natural defenses,” he said.
He said the strategy is two-pronged: protection for the remaining forests and rehabilitation of damaged areas. “We are doing it two ways. One is we have to rehabilitate the damaged areas. We have more than 8 million hectares of open denuded and degraded forests. And we are also implementing a total log ban in the natural forests to protect the remaining,” he said.