The incoming Aquino administration must begin to address the threats of environmental destruction that every rainy season brings by adopting the proposed Tree Legacy Bill as the destruction of Philippine forests which has already reached alarming levels.

This was stressed on Saturday by Senator Edgardo J. Angara whose Tree Legacy Bill seeks the creation of a forest management program to put a halt to the rapid deterioration of the country’s forests.

The administration of the late President Corazon C. Aquino tried, but failed to reforest the country’s denuded mountains by borrowing millions of pesos from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Then Senate President Neptali A. Gonzales had tagged Aquino’s reforestation program as a failure.

Citing a Commission on Audit (CoA) report, Gonzales had pointed out that most of the contracts farmed out to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were implemented haphazardly, or were questionable at best.

Angara cited a report of the Haribon Foundation which stated that the country’s forests have already reached the threshold of sustainability.

In the 1990s, forest cover in the Philippines was estimated at 21-million hectares. A decade later, it was further reduced to 800,000 hectares.

“The year 2010 is projected that forest cover will be reduced to an upsetting a measly 266,666 hectares,” warned Angara, former secretary of agriculture.

Angara , a former University of the Philippines (UP) president, stressed that the destruction of these forests has had disastrous effects on the country’s rich biodiversity, with many endemic species pushed to extinction.

“We are blessed with such resources, but we are always challenged by disasters, natural and even man-made disasters, that are gravely damaging and exploiting our environment,’’ he said.

Angara noted that “limited forest cover affects not only our environment but our economy as a whole; but also the people from the provinces, their livelihood, and lives.’’

This developed as Sen. Manny Villar accounted for a total of 756 bills and resolutions, based on the Legislative Bills and Index Service of the Senate.

Records showed that 6,719 bills and resolutions were filed by all the senators during the 14th Congress.

President-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III had 72 or just above one percent of the total.

Documents signed by Lorelei Haguring of the Indexing and Monitoring Section revealed that Aquino only filed nine bills as principal author in the three years that he was a senator.

Aquino was also a co-author in 20 other bills.