Batangas site of 5 oil spills from July to October – WWF

THREE months after the oil spill caused by the ill-fated tanker MT Solar I in central Philippines, shipping officials have apparently failed to learned their lessons until now, an environmental advocacy group said Saturday.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) lamented this as it claimed that at least five oil spills took place off Batangas from July to October this year.

“Although the series of Batangas slicks were minor compared to Guimaras, they continued one after the other, and no ship or company was identified, nor held to task,” WWF said in its website.

It added that, “If this environmental crime goes unpunished in a highly-visible sea lane located so close to Manila, one wonders about the dozens of other channels, passes and straits that criss-cross the remotest portions of our archipelago.”

Citing information reaching it, WWF said the oil spills happened at Maricaban Strait, which includes the world-famous diving destination Anilao, Batangas.

Maricaban has four marine sanctuaries and is home to charismatic marine species such as dolphins, manta rays and hawksbill turtles.

Aside from providing livelihood for hundreds of small fishermen, it is an internationally renowned tourism destination with about 40 dive sites, WWF said.

WWF said the first spill incident was reported last July 18 in front of Eagle Point Resort (EPR) in Bagalangit village in Mabini. Resort staff responded and swiftly cleaned the oil debris.

A second spill occurred September 9, in Sepoc Beach, Maricaban village in Tingloy. Coast Guard units immediately conducted an inspection of the area as EPR staff cleaned the oil.

In October, oil was found from Layag-Layag Reef to Sepoc Beach. Again, PCG units conducted an inspection as EPR staff cleaned the area.

One week later, more oil was found in popular diving sites including Kirby’s Rock and Bahay Kambing in Caban Island, Tingloy.

Local police and Bantay Dagat volunteers inspected the area but found no evidence linking the spill to a barge at the site.

The next day, fishermen reported seeing another oil slick near Mainit village.

“This series of spills have been attributed to local ships discharging bilge oil – a mixture of water, used oil and other residual pollutants. Dumping oil in the ocean is cheaper than disposing of it properly. It is illegal, deliberate and, apparently, a common practice in the Philippines,” WWF said.

It said a study by the US National Research Council concluded that 46 percent of the oil entering the oceans comes from marine transportation through accidents or deliberate discharge. (GMANews.TV, Nov. 11, 2006)

Petron reports profit drop on lower prices

By Euan Paulo C. Añonuevo
Manila Times, Nov. 11, 2006

PETRON Corp. said its end-September profits suffered a double-digit decline because of the unexpected drop in crude and finished product prices in the third quarter.

In a statement on Friday, Petron said that its net income from January to September went down by 16.4 percent to P4 billion from the same period last year.

Revenues grew by 18.64 percent to P164.2 billion year on year.

The company reported that it experienced inventory losses because of the unprecedented drop in oil prices.

The price of Dubai crude dropped from a high of $72.24 a barrel in August to a low of $54.92 a barrel in September.

Export margins were also affected specially for industrial fuel although Petron added that its mixed xylene sales remain robust.

Despite the lower-than-expected income the company said that it will be pushing through with expansion plans in the retail market and its diversification strategy into petrochemicals.

Petron, which dominates the market with a 39.1-percent share, has the biggest service station network in the industry with a 34.3-percent share at more than 1,265 stations nationwide. It also has a 47.5-percent share in industrial trade.

The company also said that the engineering, procurement and construction of its Petro Fluidized Catalytic Cracker (PetroFCC) unit is already a third complete. The PetroFCC will allow the company to produce high-value white products and extract the petrochemical grade propylene.

Petron is also set to construct a BTX unit under a planned $300-million refinery master plan to produce aromatics such as benzene and toluene and expand its mixed xylene production capacity.

Guimaras villagers end evacuation, start going home

By Nestor P. Burgos Jr.
Inquirer, Nov. 12, 2006

ILOILO CITY—Residents of Guimaras Island, who had been forced to leave their communities, have started returning to their homes, nearly three months after a massive Petron oil spill contaminated coastal villages of the island.

Around 100 families, or 300 persons, from evacuation centers in Nueva Valencia town went home Wednesday, said town mayor Diosdado Gonzaga in a telephone interview.

Most of the residents were evacuees staying in temporary shelters in school buildings, plazas and health and barangay centers in the villages of Cabalagnan and Tando. The two villages are among worst hit by oil sludge after the MT Solar I sank 13 nautical miles off the coast of Nueva Valencia on Aug. 11.

Gonzaga said the remaining evacuees will also return home in the next few days in areas that have been cleared of toxicity by environment officials.

The number of evacuees in Nueva Valencia and Sibunag towns reached a peak of 201 families, or around 600 persons, with most of the evacuees staying with their relatives after the evacuation was ordered on Aug. 29 because of health risks.

The residents were evacuated from their homes that were within the 100-meter risk zone from the shoreline which were contaminated by the bunker fuel. Tests showed high levels of toxicity in these areas.

On Oct. 31, the regional multi-agency Task Force Solar I Oil Spill recommended to Guimaras officials the return of evacuees from 10 areas after these have been cleared of toxic fumes and contaminated debris.

An assessment team led by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources measured the level of hydrogen sulfide in the ambient air in the 10 areas at .002 parts per million (ppm) which is below the acceptable level of .07 ppm as defined by the Clean Air Act.

Aside from the villages of Cabalagnan and Tando, the areas declared safe for the return of evacuees were Barangays Canhawan, Igdarapdap, Sitios Lusaran and Sumirib in Barangay Lapaz, and Sitio Guisi and Basioa Cove in Barangay Dolores, all in Nueva Valencia and Barangay Alegria and the island-village of Naoway in Sibunag town.

The Task Force SOS earlier set two conditions to be satisfied before an area will be cleared for the return of evacuees: The area should be cleared of oil contaminated debris and have an acceptable level of hydrogen sulfide.

Gonzaga said that residents in the affected areas have started fishing again in the waters of Guimaras.

The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources had declared fish from Guimaras waters safe for eating but advised residents not to eat shellfish.

The environment of the economy

By Jean-Paul Fitoussi
Manila Times, Nov. 8, 2006

NO economy is a closed, autonomous universe, governed by rules independent from law, morals and politics. Indeed, the most interesting economic questions are generally located on the borderline with neighboring disciplines. But nowhere is this clearer than in the interaction between economic processes and the natural environment.

The distinctive feature of this exchange is that it is governed not by the laws of mechanics, but by thermodynamics, particularly the law of entropy, according to which the quantity of free energy that can be transformed into mechanical work diminishes with time—an irreversible process culminating in “heat death.” Numerous researchers, inspired by the late Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s pioneering work on the relationship between economic processes and physics, tried—not very successfully—to formulate an “entropic” theory of economy and society, especially during the seventies.

The entropic view assumes that economic processes produce irreversible consequences because of their multiple interactions with nature. We draw from stocks of nonrenewable natural resources (for example, oil and metal ores), and we deteriorate or modify the quality of other resources (for example, water and arable land) by imposing on them a rhythm of exploitation superior to their capacity for regeneration. In fact, the exploitation of nonrenewable resources frees the speed of economic growth from that of ecological renewal, aggravating the deterioration of the biosphere, including irreversible climate changes.

The law of entropy reminds us that we will leave to future generations a degraded natural patrimony, probably less adequate to their needs than what we inherited. Unfortunately, there are no simple answers. For the sake of what principle can we ask China and India, for example, to limit their economic dynamism so that they use smaller amounts of the planet’s natural resources? After all, the advanced countries’ slower growth is not the consequence of voluntary self-limitation, but of our superior standard of living—and of our incapacity to settle our own economic imbalances.

We cannot impose an ecological rhythm on people who are poorer than we are when it is the very fact that we freed ourselves from that rhythm that made us richer. Economic contraction, or even stagnation, is not a solution for the developed countries, either, for a similar reason: it would imply that we either accept existing inequalities or impose a regime aiming at an equal redistribution of resources. That choice boils down to an unbearable cynicism or a totalitarian utopia.

But, happily for us, our evolution is determined not only by entropy, but also by the accumulation of knowledge and technological progress—a process that is just as irreversible as the decrease in stocks of nonrenewable resources and the degradation of environmental quality. Thus, the economy is entropic for resources and historical for the production, organization and spread of knowledge, with the prospects for economic and environmental sustainability residing in the space left between those two dynamic processes: the level of growth we choose must be conditioned on a sufficient level of knowledge to ensure the system’s survival.

Yet nature, like knowledge, is a public good that needs state intervention to be “produced” in sufficient quantities. The only way to overcome the finiteness of our world is to maintain as much space as possible between entropy and history by investing in education and research aimed at increasing renewable energies, reducing the energy intensity of our standards of living and slowing the pace of environmental erosion.

It is widely believed that such a strategy would be useless if the only effect is to allow others to get rich faster by opting out. But if that strategy is conceived as mastering two dynamic processes, overcoming the ecological constraint could be an accelerator of growth.

Jean-Paul Fitoussi is president, l’Observatoire Français des Con­jonctures Économiques, Paris.

ASEAN addresses environment issues

By Irene R. Sino-Cruz
Inquirer, Nov. 11, 2006

LAPU-LAPU CITY – Environment ministers of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) on Saturday agreed to further enhance regional cooperation to protect the environment, promote biodiversity, and deal with cross-border problems such as forest fire haze and the illegal trade in wildlife.

In a Cebu Resolution on Sustainable Development, adopted at the end of the two-day 10th Asean Ministerial Meeting on the Environment held at the Shangri-La’s Mactan Island Resort and Spa, the environment ministers also expressed full support for the recently established Asean Center for Biodiversity, which is hosted by the Philippines.

The Mactan meeting is a prelude to the 12th Asean Summit in December which will be held in Cebu.

In the resolution, the ministers agreed to pursue the listing of Asean Heritage Parks as a way to manage the region’s rich biological resources.

In the Philippines, there are four Asean Heritage Parks: The Mt. Apo Natural Park in Davao Oriental, the Mt. Iglit-Baco National Park in Mindoro, the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park in Palawan, and the Tubbataha Reef Marine Park in Sulu.

(For the full story, click Asean environment).

Biodiversity summit on Verde Island

AMBIENT VOICES
By Ma. Isabel Ongpin
Manila Times, Nov. 10, 2006

THE Philippines is rising to the challenge of being a biodiversity hotspot. Last Wednesday, November 8, a biodiversity summit was held on Verde Island, the sentinel of the much-crossed Verde Island Passage between Luzon and the Visayas.

Led by President Arroyo herself and organized by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources with Secretary Angelo Reyes and his wide spectrum of staff specialists, ably assisted by private sector groups and non­government organizations with the participation of local government officials and international environmental organizations, the Verde Island summit on biodiversity had a formal output—a pledge to conserve and protect Philippine biodiversity in multiple ways by a wide range of entities and citizens so as to hand it unchanged and unimpaired to the younger generation.

Kent Carpenter himself of the World Conservation Union, who together with Victor Springer of the Smithsonian Institution did the pioneering study on global marine shore fish biodiversity which concludes that the Verde Island Passage has the highest concentration of diverse marine species on the planet, was present and gave his lecture on the subject.

The good news as he said was that through the unique geology of the Philippines and how it was formed in the movement of land masses from north to south and vice versa. Through high seismic activity, a wide range of marine life has survived, flourished and generated because of isolated water basins. As a result, the isolation factor has made for enough diversity to make the Philippines’ Verde Island Passage indisputably the center of marine diversity in the world.

The bad news is that the Philippines is one of the most threatened environments in the planet, a so-called hot spot where a threatened and degraded environment can endanger if not extinguish its very rich and diverse life forms. For the Verde Island Passage the primary dangers are marine pollution, habitat destruction and the lack of capacity to enforce laws.

Because Verde Island passage is the marine route from the north to south and vice versa in this country, it bears heavy traffic from passenger vessels to oil tankers, international shipping vehicles and local commercial transport. Dangerous chemicals aside from oil regularly pass through it. An accident like the Guimaras oil spill would be cataclysmic for its marine treasures. Meanwhile, ships have been known as a matter of practice to regularly discharge their trash along the way including Verde Island Passage before reaching port. Simultaneously, in surrounding areas over­fishing and illegal fishing methods are still going on which are already causing the disappearance of commercial fish in many former fishing grounds. Improper or intensive land use in coastal areas also takes its toll in erosion which causes damage to marine resources by making their environment less hospitable. Deforestation has its bad effects too.

These pernicious events could definitely affect the biodiversity of Verde Island Passage. But the President, the DENR together with other government agencies, virtually all of whom were present at the Biodiversity Summit, have announced their commitment to protect Philippine biodiversity using all government agencies necessary and coordinating with the private sector through business, civic spirited citizens and the youth to go on high gear for conservation and protection.

Private sector participation will be vital and already the challenge has been taken up by the Lopez Group’s power-generation company First Gen which has already led in the formation of the Verde Island Passage Marine Corridor Integrated Conservation and Development Program with an initial investment close to P3.6 million, a commitment of P8 million for the second phase and a further pledge made at the Biodiversity Summit of $1 million. Other business corporations like the Ma­lampaya Gas Corporation, Keppel Shipyards, JG Summit and others are making their own pledges for the project.

The Verde Island Passage Marine Corridor Integrated Conservation and Development Program has the participation of experienced conservation groups led by Conservation International Philippines, First Philippine Conservation, Inc. as well as Batangas province and the City of Batangas whose officials were present led by the governor and the mayor. National environment groups like Mother Earth and the Green Army are taking part.

Also partnering will be the Department of Education who will include the biodiversity in the Philippines in its curriculum to raise awareness and promote conservation and the Philippine Coast Guard who will protect the sealanes.

Other provinces whose activities can impact on Verde Island Passage were at the conference like Mindoro right across from Verde Island and Romblon. Congressman Banaag, Chair of the Congress Committee on Natural Resources, listed an impressive number of bills for environmental protection passed by the House and are now awaiting Senate action.

Many issues were tackled including the delineation of Protected Areas and National Parks nationally which the environmentalist lawyer, Antonio Oposa, urged the government to continue pursuing and implementing. A request for a cabinet cluster on the environment was presented by Romy Trono of Conservation International Philippines.

It was a high profile event appropriately enough placed on Verde Island itself which turned out to be a literally green island with bamboo groves and forest cover going all the way to the coastline. It has two marine sanctuaries and a number of beach resorts as well as diving opportunities for the Verde Island Passage marine riches. And its felicitous name appropriately enough graces the center of the center of marine biodiversity in the planet.

Related blog entry here.

Coast Guard, DENR debate on use of dispersants in oil hit mangroves

NATIONAL Disaster Coordinating Council chair Avelino Cruz and Task Force Solar 1 Oil Spill head Rafael Coscolluela last night directed the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to issue an advisory that would ban any interventions and remediation measures to save the Guimaras mangroves not cleared with the DENR through the Regional Bio-Safety Committee.

The directive was issued after a reporting session on the status of oil-spill cleanup operations in Guimaras at the Department of National Defense last night turned into a debate between the Philippine Coast Guard on the one hand, and the DENR/World Wide Fund on the other, Cocolluela said.

MT Solar 1 that sank with 2.1 million liters of Petron bunker fuel in August caused an oil spill that has hit the coasts of Guimaras and its mangroves.

Concerned about dying mangrove trees in oil-affected areas, PCG Commander Allen Toribio pushed for the application of a “diluted dispersant/high-pressure water sprayer” combination as an effective way of saving affected mangrove trees, Coscolluela said.

DENR Undersecretary Manual Gerochi, WWF’s Lory Tan and other NDCC members objected, citing the absence of documented proof that the method actually worked as reported by Toribio, who cited their Semirara experience, he added.

The scientific community, according to Tan, was particularly concerned about the effect of dispersants on the marine food chain which might be adversely affected to the extent that fish populations would be reduced.

Such a scenario demanded that any such applications should be properly subjected to controlled field trials in carefully selected sites, Coscolluela said.

At the very least, Department of Science and Technology Secretary Estrella Fabela Alabastro and Department of Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said, the trials should pass the Environment Impact Assessment process mandated under DENR rules, Cosoclluela added.

The debate ended with the PCG’s Vice Admiral Gosingan accepting the proposed “no study, no touch” policy on condition that the DENR accept responsibility for any further mangrove mortalities, he said.

Coscolluela said the DENR advisory they directed would also seek to enlighten an equally-concerned public by explaining why such precautionary measures were deemed necessary.

Cruz and Coscolluela also called for field trials to test other measures that might be better options.

An appropriate statement is expected soon from DENR Regional Director Julian Amador, who heads the local bio-safety review committee, Coscolluela added. (Carla P. Gomez, Visayan Daily Star, Nov. 8, 2006)

Guimaras cleanup put on hold

DISASTER authorities said on Wednesday that clean-up operations of mangrove areas on Guimaras Island that were severely hit by oil spill have been temporarily put on hold.

This came after concerns raised by scientists from the state-run University of the Philippines-Visayas that chemical dispersants used could damage the mangroves and marine life in the surrounding areas.

Rafael Coscolluela, presidential adviser for Western Visayas, said in a briefing in Camp Aguinaldo that cleanup would resume once there is an assurance that experts have determined a safe method.

He said that scientists would need to conduct tests for at least three months to determine if the chemical dispersants which the Coast Guard originally intended to use are safe for the mangroves and marine life.

Coscolluela confirmed that some 20 percent of the 120 hectares of mangroves on the island have died from the oil spill caused by the sinking of M/T Solar 1 on August 11.

The chemical dispersants that the Coast Guard was planning to use were the same one that were used during the cleanup of the recent Se­mirara oil. Coscolluela said, however, that scientists were yet to determine whether the chemical dispersants would leave ill effects on the environment, specially on marine life in the surrounding areas on Guimaras. (Anthony Vargas, Manila Times, Nov. 10, 2006)