Rainforests Cut Down in the Philippines

The Philippine archipelago comprises of more than 7,000 islands. In the 1920s, 60 percent of the land was covered in tropical rainforest -- today, it is less than 18 percent. The rainforest had to give way to housing, plantations and fields. But while the tropical rainforest loses around three tonnes of soil per hectare per year, monocultures, like coconut plantations, lose up to 250 tonnes of soil every year.

"We cannot cut the trees in the forests because then we will get the floods and erosion which destroy our flatlands," said Francis Lucas, the president of the Catholic Media Network in Manila. As president of the Catholic Media Network, an organisation which has access to the majority of the inhabited islands of the Philippines, he is trying to draw attention to the connection between exploitation of natural resources and natural disasters.

Exploiting natural resources

"The mountains and the lowland coastal forests -- the mangrove swamps -- have the largest biodiversity in the whole ecosystem," explained Francis Lucas."But whenever there is a natural disaster, we always find out that we are to blame for it because we neglect the environment and exploit our natural resources."

The consequences do not show straight away, explained Wade Lim, an organic farmer and an active environmentalist, who lives in the province of Southern Leyte. "The trees have long, deep roots which store water and prevent erosion. But if a tree is cut down, it takes up to five years before the roots decay and can’t hold any more water."

Wade Lim is a co-founder of the non-governmental organisation "Southern Leyte for Integrated Development and Natural Resource Management". He comes from Hinunangan, Southern Leyte. When he was a child, he used to watch how the lorries loaded with timber leave the forest.

"As a child, I used to ride on the lorries. Sometimes, they carried just one tree trunk, which was big enough to fill the whole truck. Some of those trees had two or three metres in diameter! But such trees don’t exist anymore. Some time ago, we did a report about the region’s biodiversity and we could only find one such tree, with 210 cm in diameter."

More typhoons

Deforestation has disastrous consequences. The people of the Philippines have had to cope with extreme weather conditions for the last 50 years. Towns and villages no longer have any natural protection against typhoons. As a result of global warming, the typhoons have also become more devastating and more frequent. Today, many even speak of "super-typhoons". Dr Paciencia Milan, the president of Visayas State University, said she was very worried about the future.

"By destroying biodiversity, we destroy our resources. And when these resources are gone, what shall we do? Where shall we go?"