MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Environment and Natural Resources said Tuesday it is targeting to reforest one to two million hectares of land in the country before the term of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. ends in 2028.
“One million [hectares] is our modest target,” DENR Secretary Maria Antonia Loyzaga said in a briefing. “Two million [hectares] is our reach, but I hope [the target] reaches 10 million.”
Loyzaga stressed that partnerships are needed to meet the government’s reforestation goals.
“The only way we’re going to be able to implement reforestation at a phase that everyone anticipates is by building partnerships in areas where it is a priority,” she said.
The DENR created this year a geospatial database office, which identifies and puts values on the country’s natural resources and monitors the progress of its reforestation efforts.
“What this will do is allow us to identify where the priority is in terms of forestation, reforestation, afforestation,” Loyzaga said.
The Philippines had a little over seven million hectares of forested land as of 2015, according to data from the DENR’s Forest Management Bureau.
Ninety percent of the archipelago was believed to be covered by forests in the 16th century, but it declined to about 70% in the early 1900s. Between 1934 and the mid-1980s, around 10 million hectares of forest were lost.
Deforestation worsened during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. as the Philippines became a major exporter of logs. Timber licensing agreements were also given to the relatives and cronies of Marcos Sr.
The administration of former President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III launched in 2011 an ambitious reforestation effort: the National Greening Program NGP). It aimed to restore 1.5 million hectares of land with 1.5 billion trees from 2011 to 2016.
A 2019 report of the Commission on Audit (COA), however, found that the move to fast-track NGP without adequate preparation and stakeholders’ support “opened the program to waste.” State auditors also noted the seedlings that survived hardly made any dent in reforestation efforts since most of the planted agroforestry species do not contribute to forest cover.
Aquino’s successor Rodrigo Duterte extended the flagship reforestation program to 2028. The Enhanced National Greening Program (eNGP) was expanded to restore all remaining unproductive, denuded and degraded forestlands in the Philippines.