The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is enhancing the capacities of Community Environment and Natural Resource Offices (Cenro) across the country to adequately address environmental and mining issues.
Environmental issues such as water and air pollution fall under the mandate and jurisdiction of the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB), while mining falls under that of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB).
DENR Undersecretary for Climate Change Services and Mining concerns Analiza R. Teh said the DENR chief wants to equip Cenros with the right tools consistent with the development of a new organizational structure.
Some DENR regional offices now have an assistant director for environment and assistant director for mines, along with a National Greening Program coordinator.
Before, the DENR regional offices only have a regional director and an assistant regional director.
The regional directors of the EMB and MGB have beem placed under the director of the EMB and MGB Central Office based in Quezon City.
Capacity building possibly means the transfer of environment and mining experts from the EMB and MGB regional offices or hiring of new personnel to be assigned to the Cenros, which is accountable to the Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Office chiefs.
According to Teh, under the new set up, the EMB and MGB chiefs in the regions will now be answerable to the DENR regional director.
“What the secretary wants is for the EMB and MGB to fall under the supervision of the DENR regional directors,” she added.
The capacity-building activities, according to Teh, will hopefully be concluded with environmental and mining experts assigned at the Cenros.
“We call it embedding mining capacities to Cenro level,” Teh said.
“The secretary said our Cenros are our frontlines, but their skills are more on the investigation [work], on forestry. In case of water pollution or mining issues, they are the ones we ask but we do not really have mining experts in the Cenros,” she added.
Teh said the DENR regional directors will have supervision over MGB and EMB officials, but in turn will answer to the DENR chief, his undersecretaries and assistant secretaries.
Simply put, Teh said the DENR regional director should know what is happening in his region, whether it involves water pollution or mining issues.
Teh added that under the law, the line bureaus have so-called “autonomy” in terms of administration and finance, but regional directors will be vested with supervisory powers in the aspect of operations.
“We already have legal experts, lawyers in the Cenros. Now we are adding experts in mining and environmental issues to ensure multi-partite monitoring on the ground,” she said.
“We are moving in that direction to harmonize everything to make the regulation and enforcement more effective,” Teh said.