Move to capacitate Wahig villages for climate change risk mitigation gets push

TAGBILARAN CITY, July 28 (PIA)--A move to push a major river system in Bohol to the identified priority areas for a national program on enhancing climate change and disaster risk resilience or its communities and its ecosystems steps off.

At the media interaction held alongside the training of communities living in the Wahig-Inabanga Upper River Basin conducted by the Climate Change Commission (CCC), no less than a community mobilizer and local governance veteran Romeo Teruel opened the request to CCC executive director Secretary Emmanuel de Guzman. 

Teruel, who now helps coordinate and facilitates the Integrated Natural Resources and Environment Management Project for the Wahig-Inabanga Upper River Basin hopes the CCC consider the Bohol River Basin among the initially identified priority areas. 

Wahig Inabanga Upper River Basin is considered the largest and the most important river in Central Visayas due to its high potential as a source of surface water for agriculture, household, commercial, industrial and recreational uses, Teruel said. 

It also has significant physical features and biological resources and a strategic location hosting 17 local government units, a critical national park, major watersheds and over a hundred barangays mostly relying on the forest for additional income. 

The CCC comes here in Bohol to roll out its Communities for Resilience (CORE) project, the commissions flagship community capacity building program for communities against climate change and its adaptation measures. 

Picking Bohol, reputedly one of the most disaster prone provinces in the country, the CCC, an office under the Office of the President is the lead policy making body of the government tasked to coordinate, monitor, coordinate and evaluate the government programs and action plans to ensure that local and national plans integrate.

Using the National Climate Change Action Plan (NCCAP) as its framework of operations for 2011-2028, the government, through the CCC has also used it as a strategic direction towards addressing climate change and mitigating its impacts. 

NCCAP aims to build adaptive capacities of local communities and increase their resilience, especially its vulnerable sectors and natural ecosystems form the effects of climate change, explains Sec de Guzman, during the press conference at the sidelines of the training seminar held at the Bohol Plaza. 

The general idea is to optimize mitigation opportunities towards gender responsive and rights based sustainable development, a press statement from the CCC pointed out. 

But, while he program integrates efforts of government agencies and stakeholders into a holistic and integrated action to manage the risks, the CORE project did not include Bohol as among its identified priority areas. 

Initially identified and categorized as priority areas for the CORE project are 18 major river basins in the country: Apayao-Abulog River Basin, Abra River Basin, Cagayan River Basin, Agno River BasinPampanga River Basin, Marikina River Basin, Pasig-Laguna Bay River Basin and Bicol River Basin in Luzon.

In Mindanao, CORE is identified in Tagolo-an River Basin, Agusan River Basin, Tagum-Libuganon River Basin, Buayan-Malungon River Basin, Mindanao River Basin, Ranao River Basin and Cagayan de Oro River Basin. 

In the Visayas, the river basis systems identified are Panay River Basin, Jalaur River Basin, Ilo-ilo Batinao River System, Central Cebu River System and Ilog Hilabangan River Basin. (rac/PIA-7/Bohol)