TO further boost the country’s reforestation effort, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is forging ties with the Asean-Republic of Korea (ROK) Forest Corp. (Afoco) to establish a forest regional training center in Candelaria, Zambales.
The P700,000 budgeted project aims to enhance the knowledge and skills of forest managers and peoples’ organizations in restoring and protecting the Asean region’s forest and fight global warming and climate change, environment official said on Tuesday.
The DENR is currently implementing the Enhanced-National Greening Program (E-NGP), which aims to reforest an estimated 7.1 million hectares of open, degraded and denuded forest being eyed as a climate-change adaptation and mitigation measure, food security and antipoverty alleviation program rolled into one.
In a news statement, Orlando Panganiban, head of the Forest Resources Management Division of the DENR’s Forest Management Bureau (FMB), said the Asean regional training center will serve as a demonstration area for the application of assisted natural regeneration (ANR) technology using the landscape approach for sustainable forest management.
The training center will benefit forest technicians, including members of people’s organizations.
Panganiban said the center will develop and promote a 30-hectare ANR demonstration area, which is being eyed as “a cost-efficient” way of regenerating forest by enhancing the establishment of secondary forest from degraded grassland and shrub vegetation by protecting and nurturing the mother trees and their wildlings inherently present in the area.
He said the objective of ANR is to accelerate, rather than replace, natural successional processes by removing or reducing barriers to natural forest regeneration, such as soil degradation, competition with weedy species and recurring disturbances, like grass fire and grazing.
“In ANR, seedlings are, in particular, protected from the undergrowth and extremely flammable plants, such as cogon [imperata cylindrical] and talahib [saccharum spontaneum],” he said, adding that as a protection effort, new trees are planted when needed or wanted, otherwise called enrichment planting.
According to Francisco Milla Jr., director of DENR in Central Luzon, the training center is a big support to the DENR and the Asean member-countries to further boost reforestation effort in the region.
“This will enable us to fast-track the restoration of degraded forestland and watershed, and with ANR, forests grow faster than they would naturally,” he said.
The Afoco turned over to the DENR half-a-million pesos worth of equipment, including generators, fire fighting equipment, desktop computers, projectors and geographical positioning system (GPS) units, that will initially be used in the center to help improve the DENR’s reforestation efforts.
The organization of Afoco was first proposed by the Republic of Korea in June 2009 to share their experiences and technologies with other Asian countries in the forest sector as a forest cooperation organization, which aims to promote forest restoration and rehabilitation and sustainable development in the Asian region.
It was formally established in November 2011, after ratification by 10 Southeast Asian Nations, including Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.