Suchergebnisse

Soil erosion and environmental degradation due to the cultivation of marginal upland areas are now considered major environmental risks in the Philippines. Agroforestry may help address the situation. In agroforestry systems, the positive interactions of tree-crop combinations not only improve biophysical conditions in farms, but also enhance food security in farming households. A combination of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), a household survey, focus group discussions, field experiments, and simulation modeling was undertaken in Claveria, Misamis Oriental, Philippines. The agroforestry system adopted depended on the farmers' motivations. The adoption of agroforestry significantly increased the households' level of income by around 42-137 %, compared with that from continuous annual mono-cropping. Another beneficial feature of an agroforestry system was the enhanced nutrient inflow to the system through leaf litterfall, stemflow, and throughfall. A modeling study using the WaNuLCAS model showed that the Eucalyptus-maize hedgerow system provided significant improvements to a range of biophysical and economic measures of productivity and sustainability. It is recommended that both national and local government units mainstream their policies and efforts toward promoting agroforestry adoption in the Philippine uplands.

Fishkill in Taal Lake has long been a socio-economic problem of the people who rely on the lake for livelihood. More recently, the national government considered fishkills as a food security concern. Although recorded occurrences of fishkill show seasonality patterns, predicting with high fidelity when within seven days and where in the vast expanse of the lake will fishkill occur is still a challenge. A fishkill early warning system (FEWS) based on predictive models requires an expensive three-dimensional array of physico-chemical sensors that must not only span the lake surface but must also extend down within the fish culture depth. Currently, such a network of sensors is an impractical approach with a projected annual operational and maintenance cost greater than the amount it will save to avoid a fishkill losses in a year. In recent years, the social media has become one of the main avenues for expressing real-time concerns among technology-aware Filipinos. Because the social media has attained unprecedented reach even in the remote areas of the Philippines, it is seen as a possible cheaper alternative to sensor-dependent FEWS through what is called "social sensors." Social sensors are the "tweeted" concerns of lake residents when fishkill symptoms have been observed within the lake. In this study, an ICT-based system was constructed to collect dated and geolocated microposts from Twitter users within the 10-km radius of Taal Volcano (14°N, 121°E). The system collected tweets from February 2013 to January 2014 and computed the tweets' respective overall contextual sentiment polarities (OCSP). Two fishkill events were reported within this time period. Data show that neutral to positive OCSP prevail when no fishkills have been reported, while increasing frequency of negative OCSP's was observed 1-7 days before the reported fishkills. The co-occurrence of prevailing negative OCSP and fishkill event may provide the much sought-for fidelity to "nowcast" fishkill at a much cheaper price, or to augment existing physico-chemical-based predictive models. Such an ICT-based system may be customized to cheaply "social sense" other natural phenomena that threatens food security in the Asian region. The utility of this system to improve the nowcasting capability of FEWS underscore the emergence of a new remote sensing tool that can augment, if not replace, current conventional physico-chemical-based sensors.

The physical impacts of extreme weather disturbances such as storms and typhoons had been increasing in Santa Rosa-Silang Watershed, where rapid land use conversion and high population pressure are major environmental issues. In this study, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was used to analyze the hydrology and sediment yield in the 102-km2 watershed. Spatial information such as digital terrain model and land cover map, both processed and validated using remote sensing and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data, and soil map together with 36-year rainfall and temperature data, were imported in the model's platform to generate surface inflow, outflow, and sediment yield in the 49 hydrologic response units (HRUs) in the watershed. With these, specific HRUs vulnerable to flooding and erosion were identified and most of these areas were reflective of the high risk barangays previously identified by the local government. Flash flood and erosion occurrences in these areas were primarily due to the low permeability and weak stability of their land cover during extreme rainfall. The results of this study can be an initial scientific basis in developing area-specific mitigation and adaptation strategies to climate-related natural disasters.

A survey of the production and marketing system of Gmelina arborea (Roxb.) in smallholder farms was conducted in Claveria. Survey respondents included farmers, who planted and have undertaken their first harvest of Gmelina trees, and sawmill operators in the nearby coastal towns who are processing and marketing Gmelina logs. Average farm size in the study was 2.5 ha. The majority of farmers have planted half or less than half of their farms to Gmelina arborea. The most common method of planting Gmelina is block planting while some farmers planted Gmelina as hedgerows along contour areas. The number of trees planted in these smallholder farms ranged from less than 100 to 1020 trees. Farmers planted Gmelina trees mainly for construction materials for future family houses. However, most of the farmers had to cut and sell their trees to meet immediate financial needs such as payment of their children's schooling and loans, and to buy farm equipment, household appliances, and animal feed. Harvested trees are sold either as timber (unprocessed log) or flitches (processed log). Higher prices are being paid for processed logs (USS 114.48-161.12 m-3 during the wet season) to cover cutting and sawing costs. Prices of Gmelina products fluctuate seasonally, with higher prices during the dry season due to high demand. Unprocessed logs are sold at USS 55.12 m-3 during the wet season and can sell as high as USS 114.48 m-3 during the dry season. Selling timber by boardfoot1 was considered better than crude scaling of whole trees because the former is a more accurate method of estimating wood volume. Lessons learned by farmers include the greater advantages of harvesting the trees during the dry season to fetch better timber prices, cutting trees at full maturity for better wood quality, growing cash crops during the first two years of tree growth, hedgerow planting of Gmellna trees for better soil erosion control, and planting the trees at 3 m × 4 m spacing for optimum growth. There is a big market for Gmelina tree products in Claveria, both locally and internationally. Tree products marketed include wood for house construction and furniture making, slabs for forklift crates and tomato boxes, and for electric posts. However, government policies should be formulated to provide an efficient pricing system and improve the marketing system of timber products in the area as well as in other parts of the country. Government assistance will also be needed to encourage smallholder tree planting to improve the country's timber industry.

© 2015 Udaya Sekhar Nagothu+, selection and editorial material; individual chapters, the contributors. The food security debate in the Philippines is synonymous with producing enough food, mostly cereals, to meet the country's needs. The current institutional set-up is biased towards food production and less on food accessibility and nutritional balance, including food safety. It has also been the basis of development programs and policies in the Philippines. This is evident to some extent from the Philippines' Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA) of 1998 whose main goal is to modernize the country's agriculture and fisheries sectors for competitiveness. The AFMA stipulates, the State shall promote food security, including suffi ciency in our staple food, namely rice and white corn. The production of rice and white corn shall be optimized to meet our local consumption and shall be given adequate support by the State.

This study uses a spatially-explicit land-use/land-cover (LULC) modeling approach to model and map the future (2016-2030) LULC of the area surrounding the Laguna de Bay of Philippines under three different scenarios: 'business-as-usual', 'compact development', and 'high sprawl' scenarios. The Laguna de Bay is the largest lake in the Philippines and an important natural resource for the population in/around Metro Manila. The LULC around the lake is rapidly changing due to urban sprawl, so local and national government agencies situated in the area need an understanding of the future (likely) LULC changes and their associated hydrological impacts. The spatial modeling approach involved three main steps: (1) mapping the locations of past LULC changes; (2) identifying the drivers of these past changes; and (3) identifying where and when future LULC changes are likely to occur. Utilizing various publically-available spatial datasets representing potential drivers of LULC changes, a LULC change model was calibrated using the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network algorithm. After calibrating the model, future LULC changes were modeled and mapped up to the year 2030. Our modeling results showed that the 'built-up' LULC class is likely to experience the greatest increase in land area due to losses in 'crop/grass' (and to a lesser degree 'tree') LULC, and this is attributed to continued urban sprawl.

This study uses a spatially-explicit land-use/land-cover (LULC) modeling approach to model and map the future (2016–2030) LULC of the area surrounding the Laguna de Bay of Philippines under three different scenarios: 'business-as-usual', 'compact development', and 'high sprawl' scenarios. The Laguna de Bay is the largest lake in the Philippines and an important natural resource for the population in/around Metro Manila. The LULC around the lake is rapidly changing due to urban sprawl, so local and national government agencies situated in the area need an understanding of the future (likely) LULC changes and their associated hydrological impacts. The spatial modeling approach involved three main steps: (1) mapping the locations of past LULC changes; (2) identifying the drivers of these past changes; and (3) identifying where and when future LULC changes are likely to occur. Utilizing various publically-available spatial datasets representing potential drivers of LULC changes, a LULC change model was calibrated using the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network algorithm. After calibrating the model, future LULC changes were modeled and mapped up to the year 2030. Our modeling results showed that the 'built-up' LULC class is likely to experience the greatest increase in land area due to losses in 'crop/grass' (and to a lesser degree 'tree') LULC, and this is attributed to continued urban sprawl.

Sta. Rosa sub-watershed had undergone shift in economic-base from agricultural to an industrial. In understanding the patterns, drivers and impacts of land-use changes in Sta. Rosa subwatershed, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) activities were conducted with selected participants from upstream, midstream and lakeshore communities. The upstream community of Brgy. Tartaria had undergone land use conversion from forested areas in the 1920's, to deforestation in the 1940's, rice planting in the 1950's, coffee planting in the 1970's, and pineapple planting in the 1980's. The main drivers of land use changes are population migration in the 1920's; food security in the 1950's; and income generation in the 1970's and 1980's. Current problems center on agriculture. The midstream community of Brgy. Sto. Domingo had undergone conversion from sugarcane plantations in the 1970's to industrial land use in the 1990's. The lakeshore community of Brgy. Aplaya was purely agricultural (rice cultivation and duck-raising) in the 1940's to 1970's and underwent conversion into industrial-residential areas in the 1980's. Increase in population and declining rice yields are the driving factors for the land use change. Recommendations to address environmental problems in the subwatershed are crop diversifi cation and use of organic fertilizers in the agricultural and agroforestry areas, proper waste management (agricultural, industrial and household wastes), strict monitoring of factories and industries on the discharge of their liquid wastes, and community activities like "Linis Ilog" (Clean the River) program. The conduct of various PRA methodologies with local communities enabled the people to articulate on the various environmental problems that beset them and propose doable solutions to address tese. Findings of this study will be very useful to local government units and policy makers in crafting and implementing policies and programs to address environmental problems in the Sta. Rosa sub-watershed.

© 2020 by the authors. Due to the cumulative effects of rapid urbanization, population growth and climate change, many inland and coastal water bodies around the world are experiencing severe water pollution. To help make land-use and climate change adaptation policies more effective at a local scale, this study used a combination of participatory approaches and computer simulationmodeling. Thismethodology (called the "ParticipatoryWatershed Land-use Management" (PWLM) approach) consist of four major steps: (a) Scenario analysis, (b) impact assessment, (c) developing adaptation and mitigation measures and its integration in local government policies, and (d) improvement of land use plan. As a test case, we conducted PWLM in the Santa Rosa Sub-watershed of the Philippines, a rapidly urbanizing area outside Metro Manila. The scenario analysis step involved a participatory land-use mapping activity (to understand future likely land-use changes), as well as GCM precipitation and temperature data downscaling (to understand the local climate scenarios). For impact assessment, the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) tool was used to simulate future river water quality (BOD and E. coli) under a Business as Usual (BAU) scenario and several alternative future scenarios considering different drivers and pressures (to 2030). Water samples from the Santa Rosa River in 2015 showed that BOD values ranged from 13 to 52 mg/L; indicating that the river is already moderately to extremely polluted compared to desirable water quality (class B). In the future scenarios, we found that water quality will deteriorate further by 2030 under all scenarios. Population growth was found to have the highest impact on future water quality deterioration, while climate change had the lowest (although not negligible). After the impact assessment, different mitigation measures were suggested in a stakeholder consultation workshop, and of them (enhanced capacity of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and increased sewerage connection rate) were adopted to generate a final scenario including countermeasures. The main benefit of the PWLM approach are its high level of stakeholder involvement (through co-generation of the research) and use of free (for developing countries) software and models, both of which contribute to an enhanced science-policy interface.

The impact of agroforestry on food security of upland farmers is least recognized and appreciated given that the linkage between them is quite complex and not well understood. The crucial role of agroforestry in enhancing food supply and augmenting family income is commonly ignored. This study aimed to get a deeper understanding of the role of agroforestry in ensuring food security of farming households in the Philippine uplands. A combination of participatory approaches including participatory rural appraisal, household survey, focused group discussions, field experiments and simulation modeling were used for the study conducted in Claveria, Northern Mindanao, Philippines. The first major finding was that the prime responsibility for ensuring adequacy of food production and supply for the farming households rested on the husband and wife. The second major finding based on the simulation results was that agroforestry increased and stabilized corn yields under hedgerow system. Moreover, fruits from perennial crops and trees served as secondary food crops especially during lean months of food supply. The last major finding was that the adoption of agroforestry significantly increased the level of benefits by around 42-137%, compared with the low income from continuous annual monocropping. The key to making upland farm households food secure is to increase the productivity of their farms and home gardens. A good start is to promote the agroforestry system in upland areas, and it is thereby recommended that both national and local government units mainstream their policies and efforts toward promotion of agroforestry adoption in the Philippine uplands. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Literature suggests a significant potential for synergies among climate change adaptation and mitigation (CCA&M) policies, especially in urban areas. However, the understanding of how best to integrate CCA&M is limited despite the fact that there is an increasing interest, particularly in Southeast Asian countries, in achieving the integration. One such synergistic approach is to improve land-use with climate change consideration. This study aims to test this idea, conducting a pilot project with four local governments in the Silang-Sta. Rosa subwatershed of the Philippines, focusing on flood prevention that has strong spatial implications. The application of participatory watershed land-use management (PWLM), a systematic process with practical tools (e.g. scenario simulation, risk assessment), indicated that planned land-use conversion and projected climate change are likely to increase the intensity of flooding in the study area. Zoning enhancement is essential as a countermeasure. As one example, runoff neutral development measures would reduce the number of flood-affected people from approximately 226,410 to 183,349 in the future (year 2025), while preserving existing vegetation would prevent up to 528,142 tons of CO2 emissions. Illustrating the PWLM approach, this paper demonstrates the concrete use of scientific knowledge (i.e. flood hazard) for local planners to design climate change action.

Sustainability assessments of bioenergy production are essential because it can have both positive and negative impacts on society. Human preferences that influence trade-off decisions on the relevant determinants and indicators of sustainability should be taken into account in these assessments. In this paper, we conducted a survey with five groups of respondents including government officials and employees, academic and research professionals, private company managers and workers, farm owners and workers, and others (e.g. students, residents, etc.) to assess their trade-off decisions on bioenergy development in the Philippines. The analyses of the survey results reveal that sustainability of bioenergy production will depend on the choice of biomass feedstock and these choices depend on people's perceptions. Heterogeneous perceptions among the different groups of respondents on the appropriate bioenergy feedstock to achieve economic, social and ecological sustainability suggest that sustainability of bioenergy is not a generic concept. The use of aggregate indices for sustainability assessments that ignore these perceptions on bioenergy production can thus be very misleading. The preference weights from conjoint analysis, which measure human preferences on different determinants and indicators of economic, social and ecological sustainability, can help improve sustainability assessments. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.