Atty. Gloria Estenzo-Ramos
If we are to deliver to our children and their children the kind of existence that we, the present generation, owes them, we have to start being serious in ensuring that our strong and progressive laws to protect environmental and human rights are implemented by government, as principal duty-bearer and each one of us, as stewards duty-bound to protect our natural living systems.
While we have a pro-people and pro-environment Constitution, and progressive laws and jurisprudence to protect our natural life support systems and our right to life, health and a healthy environment, and in addition, a green Supreme Court which promulgated in 2010 the world’s only Rules of Procedures on Environmental Cases to protect our aforesaid constitutional rights, we still have to change mindsets and lifestyles and embark on a holistic approach to ensure sustainable development or that kind of “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
When forests, oceans, land and the essential ecosystems, flora and fauna are destroyed and depleted for so-called economic development, that compromises the rights of future generations to meet their own needs.
To survive, we need a healthy and vibrant natural world.
We need holistic policies that sustain and not destroy life, including our own.
Under the Office of the President are two entities which reasons for being are in direct collision with each other.
One is the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA), formerly known as the Public Estates Authority created under Presidential Decree No. 1084 during the dark Martial Law years. President Duterte transferred the PRA to the Office of the President on February 1.
The other office is the Climate Change Commission with the President as Chairperson, established by RA 9729, the Climate Change Act of 2009 to ensure resiliency of our natural life support systems and of our people to the dire impacts of climate change.
PEA, now PRA, was created to “reclaim land, including foreshore and submerged areas, by dredging, filling or other means, or to acquire reclaimed land.” In the process, it destroys forests, mountains and the sea and the multitude of species, both plants and animals, including people that depend on them for survival. Extinction of biodiversity is a global crisis.
Until now, the word “reclaimed” has no definition but, it means dumping and filling the ocean and cover the critical habitats like corals, seagrass, mangroves, with soil and filling materials obtained either from a mountain or from the sea bed and some have even mixed solid waste materials in it.
The Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Cristiana Pașca Palmer, said “people in all countries need to put pressure on their governments to draw up ambitious global targets by 2020 to protect the insects, birds, plants and mammals that are vital for global food production, clean water and carbon sequestration.”
Let’s put that pressure now as tomorrow might be too late.