Opposition Senator Loren Legarda, a staunch climate change advocate, pressed on Thursday for active participation of the private sector in reforesting the country’s denuded mountains to mitigate the increasing damage caused by climate change.

She said the government has to “look into the past reforestation efforts because they have seemingly have not been successful.’’
 
“But definitely what we must do is to stop or ban the further cutting of trees because the siltation of our rivers and the floods was brought about in part due to the denudation of our forest and due to excessive resource extraction or mining,’’ she said.

The chairperson of the Senate climate change commission said the widespread flooding in Metro Manila, southern Tagalog provinces, Central Luzon and Northern Luzon attributed to storm “Ondoy’’ and typhoon “Pepeng’’ last month was caused by the excessive rainfall and the deteriorated condition of the country’s mountains, among others.

Legarda noted that the streets and homes in the Metro Manila area were covered with mud, which means the latter came from the soil and the forests.

An attempt by the Aquino administration to reforest the country’s vanishing forests failed after the Commission on Audit (COA) discovered that most of the non-governmental-organizations (NGOs) contracted to implement the tens of millions of pesos of loans extended by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) had no expertise to undertake the project or simply did not reforest at all.

Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri, for his part, pressed for the construction of a P20-billion Paranaque spillway project to drain waters from the heavily-silted Laguna de Bay directly to Manila Bay.

The project, conceptualized by the then Bureau of Public Works (BPW), was rejected by the Marcos administration because of the high cost involved wherein the right-of-way acquisition would eat up most of the project cost.