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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Villar to challenge Manila Bay ruling

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Senator Cynthia Villar will file a motion for reconsideration before the Supreme Court over its go-signal to reclaim the Manila Bay areas in the cities of Las Pinas and Paranaque, as she urged the High Court to take a “different and fresh appreciation” of the Environmental Impact Assessment rules.

Villar has been asserting that any reclamation project in the areas would impede the flow of the six rivers emptying into Manila Bay, which would cause massive flooding.

They are the Imus River in Imus City, Bacoor River in Bacoor City, Molino River in Bacoor City, Zapote River between Bacoor and Las Piñas cities, Las Pinas River in Las Piñas City, and Parañaque River in Paranaque City.

In fact, Villar said, the damage from the Imus River caused the filing of a case by lawyer Antonio Oposa, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Environmental Law, which resulted in the issuance of a mandamus on the Manila Bay by the Supreme Court.

As the country marks the first year of the UN Decade for Ecological Restoration, the senator called on the magistrates to revisit their ruling that favored Alltech Contractors’ proposed projects to develop hectares of land in Las Piñas and Parañaque, both along the coastline of Manila Bay, which had been given up and declared illegal with its ECC (environmental compliance certificate) expired.

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“This and the declaration by Congress of the existence of a climate crisis, and the two reports of the Nobel-Laureate group Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have long since rendered any decisions of the DENR (Department of Environment and Natural Resources) made in 2012 irrelevant,” stressed Villar.

She said the SC can also take judicial notice of the Expanded National Integrated Protected Areas System (E-NIPAS) Act or Republic Act 11038, which was enacted in 2018.

“This legislated the now-renamed Las Piñas Parañaque Wetland Park into a protected area,” said Villar.

She noted this area was included in the Ramsar Convention list of Wetlands of International Importance, in 2013.

A legislated protected area, the Las Piñas-Parañaque Wetland is entitled to a buffer zone in Manila Bay which cannot be reclaimed, Villar noted.

She related that the DENR is also determining the extent of the buffer zone needed for the conservation of the protected wetland park.

“The DENR’s procedures on EIA should take into consideration all these 94 newly-established Protected Areas (PAs),” said Villar, chairperson of the Senate Environmental committee.

“We have long imagined that the ecological services like the flood drainage mechanisms and the filtering capacity of the soil will be there forever. But without proper care, and paying the costs of that care, these services will dissipate. The EIA system must account for this degeneration,” she added.

The SC recently affirmed a Court of Appeals decision denying the petition for a Writ of Kalikasan filed by Villar and 315,000 petitioners to stop a reclamation that is beside the important international wetland.

According to Villar, the SC issued the decision eight years after the CA junked her petition to stop any reclamation project in the area.

She emphasized the DENR’s decision to allow the reclamation “has long since been overtaken by multiple studies, many scientific and valuation findings, most of which were not in the case file.”

“Worse, any environmental decision taken in an application for an ECC only has a 5-year validity, considering the changes in the surrounding environment and new scientific findings that may happen,” the senator said.

She also pointed out that the ECC of Alltech, despite the SC decision, has long since expired, and the failure to start up the project was not caused by this case.

Villar said if the Supreme Court says the DENR currently has sufficient technical capacity to make a determination in this case of all the factors that need to be taken into account, “then why is our environment still on the decline?”

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