Tree planting now a habit among Bicolanos; DENR to produce 26M seedlings this year By Danny O. Calleja LEGAZPI CITY, Jan. 10 (PNA) -- Jim Andes, the chief of this city’s Office of the Senior Citizens Affairs (OSCA), has included tree planting in the regular activities of his flock this year. “Inspired by the government’s National Greening Program (NGP), tree planting has been taken by many Bicolanos—young and old -- as a habit. We, the elderly of the city are joining the fad not only because it is a rewarding experience being a perfect way of giving back what we have extracted from Mother Earth but also a great step towards improving and protecting the environment,” he said. NGP is a nationwide re-greening campaign launched by Pres. Benigno Aquino III through his Executive Order No. 26 issued in February 2011 as one of the flagship environmental programs of his administration that targets to plant and grow 1.5 billion tree seedlings in 1.5 million hectares of land all over the country until 2016. Owing to the program, Bicolanos have indeed developed a great passion for planting trees and seeing them grow. On its first year alone, the program in the region was able to draw the participation of about 22,000 volunteers from both the government and private sectors in coming up with four million new trees starting with the world record-breaking mass tree-planting affair organized by the provincial government of Camarines Sur on Feb. 23, 2011. The event, initiated by El Verde and which Pres. Aquino himself in attendance, set an entry into the Guinness Book of World Records when it fixed 64,096 tree seedlings on the province’s desolated grounds in just one hour. El Verde was a greening project of Camarines Sur Gov. Luis Raymund Villafuerte which drew about 10,000 volunteers from the private sector — professionals, students and rural residents -- into that celebrated outing. More initiatives followed, among them the 11-11-11 projects initiated in Catanduanes by Rep. Cesar Sarmiento of the province’s lone congressional district which planted 118, 883 trees and in the second district of Sorsogon by its congressman, Deogracias Ramos, which accounted for 113,500 new trees on the ground. Both projects done in a day-long simultaneous planting sessions made memorable by the once-per-century numerical date 11-11-11 (Nov. 11, 2011) drew supports from many sectors in the two provinces from LGUs and barangay officials, village residents, teachers, students, government agencies to non-government organizations. NGP’s second year in Bicol added seven million, bringing to 11 million the new trees put in place all over the region in two years -- largely through voluntary public participation. The passion has since then moved on, growing another four million new trees in 2013 and last year’s estimated output which, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) regional office here is still counting, could be around five million. Hence, the demand for planting materials in Bicol has grown enormous — a challenge that DENR, the main player in the implementation of the program, has tasked itself of responding by way of putting in place more nurseries. The latest nursery is a “mechanized” one in Lupi, Camarines Sur, that targets to produce around 26 million seedlings this year. This new plant propagation facility sits in a 2.1-hectare property in Barangay Sooc, Lupi, whose output, DENR Regional Executive Director Gilbert Gonzalez on Saturday said, would be enough to supply the greening target of Bicol as well as of the Southern Tagalog Region for 2015. The mechanized nursery fast-tracks seedling production to augment the tree planting and seedling growing activities of the DENR and, given its capacity of at least 200 seedlings per hour, it can come up with 16.8 million for Bicol and 5.6 million for the other region, he said. Forestry experts push mechanized nursery as an unconventional way of speeding up seedling production and generating high-quality saplings through the use of a series of equipment for bagging, seeding, hardening and other related activities. This is different from the conventional manner of growing seedlings, considering the magnitude of seedlings to be generated in a year to address the growing demand, according to engineer Raymond Sipin, head of nursery project management unit. The Lupi facility, Gonzalez said, is one of the 20 mechanized nurseries that the DENR Central Office began establishing in selected regions last year to produce at least one million tree seedlings a day and achieve the agency’s target of planting 300 million all over the country this year. Mangrove propagules are included in the production target so that the NGP could cover more beach forests this year to enhance the country’s natural defense against storm surge, Gonzalez said. And since the program is a government’s blueprint for poverty reduction, food security, biodiversity conservation, environmental stability and climate mitigation and adaptation, the DENR gives premium importance on transparency and accountability in the implementation of NGP activities. “We are using modern technologies as a system to monitor and evaluate accomplishments in the field with minimal margin of human error and ideally open to public scrutiny,” Gonzales said. He was referring to the office’s actual ground survey of NGP planting sites in the region using Global Positioning System (GPS)-equipped receiver with Geographic Information System (GIS) software alongside the identification of appropriate species considering sites’ physical characteristics. The outputs of this survey are GIS-based maps of NGP sites in shape file format which describe points, polylines and polygons with attributes that serve as database for geotagging, another technology used in the NGP which makes it possible to monitor greening activities even in remote areas. Geotagging is in aid of ground validation of accomplishments in the field, Gonzales explained. “With innovations introduced into the NGP, it would now be with considerable ease that we can present accomplishments that hopefully are acceptable to the public this time around following doubts openly expressed over its performance,” the DENR regional head said. With factual reports that can now be viewed by everyone with access to computers and the Internet, it would also be with confidence knowing that these are efforts that have undergone much study of experts in the science of forestry, he said. It is now worth mentioning therefore that NGP, the country’s premier reforestation program has turned to science and technology in its bid to rehabilitate the environment and achieve other objectives, foremost of which is to upgrade the lives of people in the uplands, the DENR regional chief added.(PNA) RMA/FGS/DOC/CBD/PJN
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 09:00:09 +0000
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