Lifeless forests?
UNTIL I interacted with some biodiversit y experts in a workshop meeting last weekend, I didn’t k now that we have largely been doing reforestation wrong in t he Philippines. We’ve had a long histor y of ef forts to rehabilitate and reforest denuded forest lands, af ter hav ing wantonly decimated much of it over t he past centur y.
In 1900, the Philippines had 21 million hectares of lush old-grow t h forests, covering more than t wot hirds of t he countr y’s tota l la nd area.
By the 1960s, they covered only about half. Deforestation rates reached up to 300,000 hectares a year in the Marcos era, and we lost seven million hectares of forest in t he period 1965-1986, leav ing less than a quarter (23 per cent) of our tota l land area covered wit h forests.
It took only 20 years t hen to lose what took seven decades to use up before t hat.
Now, forest cover stands at about seven million hectares, af ter vast areas had been logged over by large concessionaires, or cleared and tilled by farmers pushed to seek t heir fortunes in t he uplands. At one point, we denuded forests f ive times faster than we regenerated them.
The government embarked on small-scale rehabilitation efforts during the American colonial period, starting with the establishment in 1910 of our first forestr y school in Los Banos, Laguna (now the University of the Philippines Los Banos College of Forestr y and Natural Resources).
After t he war, modest reforestation efforts were pursued, and became more multisectora l. Foreign funding f lowed in by the 1970s, at which time government had established t he forerunners of what is now the Forest Management Bureau in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
The 1990s saw the adoption of community-based forest management as our main forest management strateg y, which f inally helped arrest t he slide in forest cover, and we actua lly saw it increase by t he early 2000s.
The latest in t he series of reforestation efforts has been t he National Greening Program (NGP), which sought to plant 1.5 billion trees in
1.5 million hectares in si x years (from 2011 to 2016).
That was a ll well-meaning, aiming to reforest t housands of hectares of our denuded forests – except that the NGP ended up planting the wrong trees, and in the v iew of many, could have done more harm than good.
The reason: mahogany – more particularly, Boliv ian mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla).
For some reason, the DENR used t his a lien species for massive planting, perhaps t hinking it was t he same as, or could be an improvement over, “Philippine mahogany”.
The term had been used to refer to various dipterocarps including, lauan and apitong, which are native species.
But the bulk of trees planted were of the a lien k ind, which grew and spread rat her rapidly, while suppressing much of other vegetation and animal life around due to its peculiar physica l and chemical properties.
It is an example of what are known as a lien invasive species, which put in great peril t he ex isting biodiversit y of native species.
In the foothills of Mount Makiling in Laguna, these trees have slowly ta ken over t he native forest af ter on t heir leaves, no bacteria in t he ground, and no other vegetation around.
They have thus upset the ecologica l balance where they have thrived, and while seen as a good source of timber, they have run counter to one of the professed goals of the NGP, which is to preser ve t he nation’s biodiversit y, and hence t he abilit y to sustain life fa r into t he f uture.
The goal, biodiversit y experts tell us, should not simply be to rehabilitate a denuded forest with whatever trees grow fast or prov ide economic va lue, but to restore t he forest to as close to its origina l native vegetation as possible.
And that means we need to be reforesting wit h native species like narra, apitong, lauan and t he like.
Other wise, we could end up with forests t hat, except for t he trees t hemselves, are v ir tually lifeless.