Ifugao Rep. Teodoro Brawner Baguilat Jr. hailed the passage of the Expanded National Integrated Protected Areas System (E-Nipas) Act of 2018 under Republic Act 11038 after many years of struggle, especially by indigenous peoples (IPs) and civil society.
E-Nipas empowers local communities and ensures the protection of the rights of IPs, particularly with the sustainable management of their own ancestral domains, argued Baguilat.
He also underscored that good governance and the right political culture enable policies that promote biodiversity conservation; thus, besides empowering communities, the people must also empower leaders who are public servants concerned with the greater good rather than their own, limited partisan and personal interests.
In his keynote address during the recent Small Grants Program (SGP) National Conference in San Mateo, Rizal, Baguilat said that “communities are key to the effective and sustainable biodiversity conservation.”
The four-day biodiversity-focused conference aims to encourage and sustain interaction among local stakeholders, especially civil society, and help forge partnerships on technological and information exchanges, skills enhancement and policy development.
This event was co-organized by the Biodiversity Management Bureau (BMB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the SGP of the Global Environment Facility and the United Nations Development Programme.
The conference has brought together about 250 representatives from national government agencies and local government units, nongovernment organizations, national and international development agencies, media, academia, the business sector, and peoples and indigenous peoples to coordinate and further strengthen biodiversity conservation efforts supported by the Fifth Operational Phase of SGP.
According to the BMB-DENR, the Philippines is one of the only 17 megadiverse countries in the world hosting more than 52,177 described species of which more than half is found nowhere else in the world.
But it also has the highest concentration of threatened species per unit area in the world, making it a global biodiversity hot spot. More than 400 animal species, including the iconic Philippine eagle and the tamaraw, are included in the Red List of Threatened species of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Climate change further exacerbates the problem of damaged landscapes and seascapes.
SGP5 supports 55 projects in 135 communities in Palawan, Samar Island and the Sierra Madre Mountain Range, covering a total of 168,231.49 hectares of community protected areas that are newly established or whose management has been enhanced.
SGP5 projects are also largely responsible for mainstreaming social inclusion in biodiversity conservation work, especially the empowerment of women, indigenous peoples, and artisanal fishers and farmers.