THE Department of Natural Resources (DENR) has formed the new National Natural Geospatial Database Office (GDO) under its office to oversee the mapping of the country’s natural resources such as forests, minerals, water, and land, and identify areas for reforestation, watershed management and mining to enable the government to come up with come up applicable policies, among others.
Environment Secretary Maria Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga, in a press briefing in Malacañang, said the DENR has also created the national environment and natural resources geospatial mapping tool that determines and records the location of the country’s river basins, watersheds, and forests as well as include and use satellite imagery to process the available natural resources to account for, value, and manage properly.
“So, what this will do for us is it will allow us to identify the priority areas in terms of forestation, reforestation, or where be the water systems and infrastructure be placed in order to reach the most populations in need,” she said.
It would also be used for land management to determine if current lands are used according to their purpose or if there are lands that can be converted and used for other purposes.
Yulo-Loyzaga said the DENR started organizing the GDO after her first meeting with President Marcos Jr. following her appointment last year but its operations started in January this year with about 10 staff members.
She said that during the presentation of the GDO to the President, they requested that the office be included in the crafting of the budget for next year. She did not say how much budget they are asking but said that it would mostly go to the salaries and benefits of the staff, some of them receiving government entry-level wages, as the office and equipment used by the new office were sourced from existing resources.
She said they are also looking at building more capacity and acquiring the satellite imageries, processing, and software that GDO needs in order to continue doing its work.
She said the DENR is collaborating with the Philippine Space Agency on the use and procurement of the satellite images to be used and processed by GDO.
Yulo-Loyzaga said the GDO could also be used to assist the government in its climate change mitigation and carbon dioxide sequestration from the atmosphere, for flood management and soil erosion control, as well as for initiating and sustaining existing community-based livelihoods as a way of managing the country’s forest.
Yulo-Loyzaga said the DENR is aiming to plant trees to cover at least two million hectares of forest lands by the end of the term of the President, but the department remains hopeful that it would eventually be able to plant more to raise the forest cover to 10 million hectares.
DENR data showed that as of 2020, there were about 7.226 hectares of estimated forest cover in the country or almost half of the 15 million hectares of forest cover in the country.
Yulo-Loyzaga said DENR has mapped out one million hectares of these forest lands where the tree planting activities could be done.
She said the identified areas would be presented to local officials, the private sector, and community-based forestry and management groups to be able to focus the forestation and planting activities there.
She said the forestation and reforestation would be done nationwide but they want to give more attention to the forest lands in Region II (Cagayan Valley) and Mindanao.
Yulo-Loyzaga said among the factors that would affect the success of the forestation and greening program are the budget and partnering of DENR with other government agencies and private groups.
