By Casandra Hilary B Emata

The Xavier Science Foundation (XSF) through its executive director Roel R Ravanera and project head Sustines Magallanes presented the Payment for Ecological Services (PES) project at the National Conferences on Local Conservation Areas  (LCA) and the Indigenous Peoples and Local Community Conserved Areas and Territories (ICCA), respectively, on October 21-24.

Ravanera presented the PES program in Mt Kalatungan in the protected area of Talakag, Bukidnon that invited resource users to support watershed rehabilitation.

PES is a strategy designed to rehabilitate the denuded forests of the highlands of Bukidnon through rewarding economic incentives to the efforts of the lumad community acting as forest managers.

In Northern Mindanao, the project has been piloted in the ancestral domain of the  Miarayon-Lapok-Lirongan-Tinaytayan Tribal Association (MILALITTRA) and 1600 hectares of land has been allotted for reforestation and agroforestry ventures.

PES together with its offshoot campaign dubbed as Valuing Ecosystem Services Together (VEST)  is grounded upon the philosophy that what happens at the top trickles down to the lowlands. Evidently, during the lash of Typhoon Sendong in December 2011, most water which came down and ravaged CDO originated from the headwater tributaries in Bukidnon.

PES/VEST targets five sectors to take part in this ecological undertaking, namely, the corporations, cooperatives, the academe, religious groups and the households.

On the other hand, the Biodiversity Management Bureau (BMB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) gathered local government units and partners from the private sector nationwide to share their best practices on collaborative efforts to safeguard local biodiversity and indigenous peoples’ areas.