Roundup:
This week's most alarming story is a case of textbook enforcement failure: A steel plant in Misamis Oriental was found to be contaminated with radioactive materials. This plant had already been flagged for more than a dozen violations over a year ago, but is still in operation. So, warnings were issued and not enforced…?
[Mainstream] GMA Network / ABS-CBN ◦ [Research & Data] Kalikasan PNE
The reservoir that supplies drinking water to most of Metro Manila — Angat Dam — is sitting almost 33 meters below where it should be at this time of year. Think a 10-storey building, or the Manila Science High School Building. The Climate Change Commission is urging cities and towns to start planning for drought, El Niño, and water scarcity risks, which is the right call. But the government did also cut its own climate budget by 15% this year, on top of slashing biodiversity and forest protection funding by 65%.
[Mainstream] Business World / Philippine Information Agency ◦ [Research & Data] Eco-Business
In Palawan, the government approved the cutting of 26,617 trees to make way for a nickel mine, in exchange for the promise of replacing them with 100 indigenous seedlings per tree — that's about two and a half million seedlings — and a three-year seedling maintenance requirement. The timing is uncomfortable: Philippine nickel companies posted record profits this quarter, with nearly all sales going to China.
Read this again: This nickel took millions of years to form in Philippine soil, is being mined at the expense of ecosystem integrity, and is exported to another country as raw ore at low value. The country that processes this raw ore captures the value-added manufacturing: the refining, the processing, the finished product. The Philippines never moves up that chain. Is this trade-off really worth it?
[Mainstream] GMA Network / Daily Tribune / Context.ph ◦ [Research & Data] InsiderPH / Inquirer Business / Philippine Resources Journal / Mining Bulletin
On energy, the Department of Energy launched a campaign asking every household to turn off their lights for one hour every Saturday.
While we appreciate the gesture of an initiative, and it truly is important to instill conservation habits into your citizens, especially as a preventative measure instead of a reactive one, this seems like a small answer to a very large problem.
The problem? We, the Philippines, import 98% of our oil — expensive oil, at that — and are planning to drill for oil inside a wetland that feeds communities, shelters wildlife, and protects against floods. We do not need to do any of that to power ourselves. We are sitting on some of the largest clean energy reserves in Asia, but most of them are underdeveloped.
Our energy crisis is a crisis of political choices and infrastructure investment, not a lack of natural resources.
We are fishing our seas empty and nothing meaningful happened this week to stop it. The Philippines is losing 45 million kilos of fish every year — year after year — because we take more than the ocean can replace. Coastal fishing families are already going without. And this week, a Mongabay investigation found that in Ilocos Norte, the solar panels and wind farms being built as solutions for other problems are going up on the exact fishing grounds and ancestral lands that these coastal fishing families rely on, without anyone properly asking consent.
[Mainstream] Mongabay / Business World ◦ [Research & Data] Oceana Philippines
And in Davao, a section of the city's main garbage dump collapsed during heavy rain on May 20 and killed a person. DENR's own records show the facility had been cited for violations months before — no proper drainage permit, failing wastewater standards — and nothing was fixed. Bringing us back to our first question: What is the point of issuing warnings when you are not going to enforce them?
[Mainstream] GMA Regional TV / Inquirer / Manila Bulletin
Why this matters to us:
Angat Dam is the starting point of almost every glass of water in Metro Manila. When its level drops this low, in a few weeks or months, we could see weaker pressure at the tap, tighter rationing, more expensive refills, and less irrigation water for Bulacan and Pampanga rice fields. The Climate Change Commission is telling local governments to plan for drought — but the fact that the climate and biodiversity budget this year was cut feels like we’re turning away from the problem right as the alarms are ringing.
When the DOE's answer to a structural energy crisis is asking us to switch off our lights for one hour every Saturday, what it means is that the cost of decades of fossil fuel dependence and under-investment in the grid is being shared downward — to the household, not upward, to the companies that extracted the oil, the politicians who delayed renewable energy for decades, or the operators whose power plants are offline this week.
Palawan's forests are being cleared for nickel that goes almost entirely to China. Who bears the long-term risk of watershed damage, and who keeps the profit? The Ilocos Norte fishers who weren't consulted about a wind farm being built on their fishing grounds are asking the same question. The Isneg Yapayao tribe whose mango orchards are now a solar farm are asking the same question. As are the Davao workers displaced by a radioactive steel plant that paid a fine and kept operating.
This week’s patterns: Natural resources were converted to revenue before communities were protected, regulations were enforced too late or too lightly, and the people closest to the land and sea were asked to absorb costs they did not choose.
Tracking this week by week and building a clear understanding of how these decisions land in our daily lives, sets off a butterfly effect toward long-term change. Awareness is us refusing to let these actions stay invisible.
