MESSAGE OF DENR SECRETARY MARIA ANTONIA YULO LOYZAGA
Pilipinas Conference 2023 – Unlocking Philippine Natural Wealth : Sustainable Utilization of Resources of Economic Prosperity
Date and Time: November 22, 2023 | 12:30 PM -1:30 PM
Venue: The Conservatory of the Peninsula Manila, Makati City
Salutations…
Prof. Victor Andres “Dindo” Manhit. President, Stratbase ADR Institute,
Her Excellency Laure Beaufils, Ambassador of the United Kingdom,
His Excellency Luc Véron, Ambassador and Head Delegation of the European Union,
Her Excellency HK Yu, Ambassador of Australia,
His Excellency David Hartman, Ambassador of Canada,
Mr. Jaime Augusto Zobel De Ayala, Chairman of Ayala Corporation,
Members of the Diplomatic Community and Partners from the Private Sector,
Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.
Inclusive, resilient, as well as sustainable development requires as we all know, many stakeholders to balance the needs of today against those of generations to come. This must be done amidst the complexity and uncertainty due to climate change impacts, geopolitical shifts and the limited capacity of life to thrive on our planet. Governments cannot accomplish this vision alone. The private sector is both a strategic and critical partner on this global journey. This is especially true as we work, as Sec Mina said, within the context of the Philippines as a low middle income developing country towards our future, which is a middle income development country.
As our climate changes, societies are changing too. In our context, we have an increasing urban, digitally driven, and consumer -led growth, yet our natural resources development and agricultural and fisheries sector, as well as the environmental protection needed to sustain our society and our economy are lagging behind. This is what our administration is facing today. We are fortunate in fact to have a president that understands the inextricable link between climate, biodiversity, and sustainable development.
This forum as I see it aims to catalyze actions and investments that will determine our ability to survive and thrive in this fragile planet. I see it as an attempt to adopt a systems lens towards building the kind of nexus governance needed in an interconnected and surprisingly at times, interdependent world.
The DENR’s mandate is to protect the environment and strategically utilize the country’s natural resources by integrating environmental considerations into our economic and social policies that will foster sustainable development.
This dual mandate is as challenging as it sounds and this is evidenced by the constant conflicts we face when implementing policies that seemingly pit development against conservation and protection. This balancing act must be done by us on a daily basis. It can be accomplished only by adopting that systems lens I mentioned earlier and the kind of nexus governance that is adaptive, science and evidence-driven and visionary. This governance must build agency from collaboration and multistakeholder partnerships – so we are talking about not just whole of government but whole of society ahead of us.
I wish to reiterate my message that I gave since the beginning of my term at the DENR. Our first task has been to measure what we treasure. The science that is built upon the intersection of our natural resources geospatial database, which is one of the projects that we put online, and the Philippine development goals has set the course of our work. The natural capital and wealth accounting process we are pursuing is however impacted by a number of forces that you already know: climate change impacts and the accelerated drive to both decarbonize and adapt; the surge in global commitments towards equitable and inclusive and resilient development under the SDGs, the Paris Agreement, and the Kunming Montreal Agreement on Biodiversity, as well as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which are just a few. Advancements as well in science, engineering, technology and innovation and rapid digitalization are impacting our work; the promise and perils of artificial intelligence as applied to our work on a daily basis and in the future. We now also have a greater access to space-based information, and we are working within a global geopolitical environment that is volatile, complex and interconnected. This last factor is keenly felt in our region where there is a great need to establish stronger development and security partnerships with like-minded countries in order for us to foster a stable and rules-based order
We are a country rich in minerals, water, forests, land, and also our seas. The DENR’s office is 30,000,000 hectares of land, over 36,000 kilometers of coastline and over 2.2 million square kilometers of territorial waters. This natural capital must underpin and spur our socio-economic development, but it requires all hands to be on deck and that means the private sector must be a proactive partner of government.
While we have 15M hectares of classified forest lands today, our forests used to cover 70% of our land area. However, forest cover is now down to an estimated 23%. We have managed to increase this in the last few years but it has not been that significant. In the meantime, we have almost lost all of our timber production with the wood industry now resorting to importing 70% of our wood requirements from neighboring countries and beyond. The same situation also applies to forest products. Abaca production, which is vital in many many industries has not increased and we are missing the bus on the huge potential of the bamboo industry.
To counter this trend, within the first quarter of 2024, we will be announcing one million hectares of classified government forest lands that are currently open for investment, because they are no longer forested. These are in open or production forests where timber production, bamboo, abaca, coffee and other forest products can be cultivated. Investment term, however, will involve direct proponents required to reforest a portion of their areas which in turn can be eligible for carbon credit purposes and help increase our permanently protected forest cover. A similar announcement will also be made for areas within closed forests exclusively for carbon credit purposes and low impact activities such as eco-tourism.
The physical dimension of the country’s carbon policy framework and implementing program are currently being developed by the DENR in partnership with the UNDP, ADB and the World Bank. The World Bank’s work comes to us by way of the DOF, which is developing a carbon pricing policy, as well as a carbon tax and other instruments. We look forward to the launching of our own registry and platform next year for such credits, but there are already a number of forests for carbon projects being developed with the private sector on the voluntary carbon market.
On water, in April of this year, the President established the Water Resources Management Office (WRMO) under the DENR to coordinate all of government’s water-related initiatives. Very shortly, through Usec CP David at his own presentation, the DENR will announce the fruits of the first significant agreement in the water sector which has resulted in the preparation of 135 potential water projects for possible private sector investment. This is analysed regionally and broken down per province and river system. Through this, we hope to increase the number of persons with access to drinking water significantly and generate inexpensive hydropower to add to the renewable energy mix of the country. A portion of the government’s receipts collected from these projects will be used to enhance the very watersheds that support these water resources.
By next year, we shall also be releasing similar priority investment areas for minerals, and terrestrial, coastal and marine resources for green and blue carbon.
Further on minerals, resource development as we all know requires environmental protection as well. You all know the richness of our country’s resources. We are the fourth largest in terms of nickel exporters and we host one of the largest copper-gold deposits in the world. Recent estimates put our untapped resources at a value of over US$1.1 Trillion. We realize the urgency globally of securing these resources for decarbonization and other industrial and security-related processes. To date, we have been approached by many countries in the developed world and, as you know, there has been a strong history of minerals exports to China. Here, we’d like to note invitations from the EU towards joining the critical raw minerals club and recent conversations in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework requiring all to somehow strategize in terms of these supply chains. The geostrategic value of these minerals of well understood by this Department as are the geopolitical impacts and significance of securing processing capabilities and robust supply chains. There has been keen interest in minerals on land and in our seas. In all of these instances, environmental security is also of paramount concern.
The critical task at hand today is to engage the private sector in the responsible and sustainable development of these resources. We are fostering these partnerships for the responsible utilization of minerals and other natural resources through two internal efforts: first, is the streamlining of our processes for transparency, accountability and effective compliance monitoring. We have enlisted PWC to review our processes and our people to transform us into an organization that is fit for purpose. This has begun first with the Mines and Geoscience Bureau and the Environmental Management Bureau as well. The second effort is on digitization of our minerals-related data at the MGB through a State Department grant, Deloitte is working alongside with our own information systems group on the digitization of minerals data and will link this digitalization towards our permit processing so that we can in fact see the impacts of these efforts by 2024.
We are also reviewing the policies and practices regarding the Social Development Management Plans and Programs of mining companies and enhancing the environmental certification compliance and clearance process by directly addressing SDG targets on poverty, water, energy, land and climate action.
More specifically on environmental monitoring, while corporations are expected to do their share by ascribing to their ESG principles and the guidelines of the Task Force on Climate Financial Disclosures, the Task Force on Nature Financial Disclosures and to TSM. The DENR, for its part, has developed remote sensing tools to monitor the progress of all projects through daily satellite imagery which we are able to collect and process. Here we thank some of our country partners, for example the country of Canada for helping us access this type of input toward decision-making. We aim to establish a near real-time system where changes on land and sea that has happened yesterday can be detected as early as today. Currently these are done by nine analysts in the Geospatial Database Office but recently we have graduated an additional 31 GIS operators through our internal training program. The adoption of AI tools will make change detection even more efficient, possibly automate on this and enable us to anticipate possible violations through forecasting of the risk. A further step would be then to implement a spatial finance approach that will allow us to estimate the cost of environmental impacts by intersecting imagery with financial analysis.
I hope I have given you a brief glimpse of where the DENR is heading to in 2024 and hopefully beyond. I have to say that a number in the private sector have been constant and responsive partners to our efforts. I would like to especially cite the private sector’s contributions to the implementation of the Extended Producers Responsibility Law to accelerate our drive towards a green and circular economy, and the acceleration of our disaster risk reduction efforts as well. We are also grateful for the support towards the upcoming COP 28 in Dubai. We had corporate leaders work with us in various corporations such as Nestle and San Miguel Foods, Energy Development Corporation, of course Ayala, SM, as well as Shell in the areas of circularity and plastics pollution management, clean and renewable energy development using our environmental resources, and in building climate resilient infrastructure together with biodiversity and forest conservation.
For those who are not yet working with the DENR, we trust that you may soon consider us a partner given the many diverse challenges that we face, and the climate vision of this administration. it will not be an easy journey but it will certainly be worthwhile – Para sa Bayan.
Thank you and Mabuhay. ###
