Webinar on land use for sustainable future held

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY, Aug. 12 (PIA) – The Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC) with the support from the Forest Foundation Philippines (FFP) and the Académie De Recherche Et D'enseignement Supérieur (ARES) of the Belgian Government conducted a webinar on "Understanding Land Use Change for a Sustainable Future: An ESSC Webinar on the Bukidnon Land Cover Updates of 2005-2018."

This covers Bukidnon’s land cover mapping initiatives in coordination with the provincial government since 2005. 

“The updated land cover offers substantial help to our local communities modellers, practitioners, and public leaders including our policy makers as this will serve as one of our references in addressing various environmental and natural resources in the province,” Bukidnon Environment and Natural Resources Office (BENRO) Officer-in-Charge Cecile Egnar said in her message.

She noted the significance of the research, as the provincial government of Bukidnon is now in the process of developing and formulating its provincial physical framework plan and forest land use plan for its two cities and 20 municipalities.

With Bukidnon being a critical watershed of six major rivers in Mindanao and being tapped for agriculture, domestic industrialization, and hydropower generation, on top of supporting a huge bulk of forest eco-system in the region that are a depository for biological resources and a source of many environmental resources, Egnar emphasized the need for the province to be guided in the coming ten years when it comes to sustainable land usage and resource management.

In his presentation, Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) Professor Pierre Defourny presented the technology used in Land Use mapping and its significance and limitations in leveraging it in support of governance towards a sustainable socio-ecosystem such as gearing towards an integrated geospatial information framework and Earth Observation (EO) in which they acquire observations of the Earth's surface and atmosphere via remote sensing instruments.

“EO can now locate and monitor land change everywhere, community mapping is much more than high-tech. However, only communities and authorities empowered can manage land use based on appropriate environmental policies and socio-economic strategies for a sustainable socio-ecological system,” he said.

In this research, they have found that the province’s natural forests, which are critical to the sustainability of ecosystem services, are under pressure, with four major losses in forest blocks that were mainly due to natural forest degradation, and the occurrence of deforestation to “almost 11,000 hectares" of natural forests that were converted to grassland and agricultural land that may result in a negative impact on cultures and livelihoods in the surrounding areas, namely in Mt. Tangkulang, Northern Pantaron, Mt. Kitanglad, and Mt. Kalatungan.

To counter the negative effects of unchecked industrialization in the four major blocks, Payment for Environmental Services (PES) Adviser Rowena Soriaga disclosed the importance of linking forest agenda with water needs at community and landscape levels, updating the Comprehensive Land Use Plans (CLUP) and Forest Land Plans (PLUP), developing scheme payments for ecosystem services (PES) to communities in areas with potential for assisted natural forest regeneration, and supporting and promoting of Indigenous Community Conserved Areas (ICCA).

“We need to help people find other sustainable farming practices, alternative land uses that can provide them livelihood and greater ecosystem security,” she said.  (VPSBautista/PIA10)

source https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1050000