Osmeña: Preserving Cebu’s hinterlands

Antonio V. Osmeña
Estatements

A NUMBER of water experts agree that the availability of adequate water resources will be the most serious long-range problem to confront Cebu.

Cebu’s water is being pumped from underground aquifers too rapidly to meet the needs of a mushrooming population.

In the early 1950s, residents in Talisay town proper had fresh potable water that flowed freely out of their wells without pumping. But this was no longer the case in the 1970s due to the failure of the local government to protect the remaining forests in the hinterlands of Talisay, which includes the 200-hectare Osmeña reforestation area. The hinterlands in Talisay became degraded even though the area has been declared a protected watershed.

In Cebu—where the hinterlands constitute 70 percent of the land area or 370,000 hectares—rainwater that falls on mountains slowly percolates through the soil until it reaches a layer or stratum of rock that the water cannot penetrate.

Water builds up in the overlying sand and rocks above this impervious rock layer and fills all the openings and cracks. The soil and rock become saturated up to a certain level, called the water table.

Water below the water table slowly flows toward the sea in aquifers. These permeable underground layers of gravel, sand,
porous rock conduct water slowly from mountain areas toward the oceans when heavy rainfall occurs.

Today, the water table in Talisay town proper is about 200 feet, whereupon it used to be only a few feet.

Cebu City with a hinterland area covering 26,000 hectares is a major source of groundwater.

In ecological or any other form of land-use planning, decision to grant permits for residential, commercial, industrial or other uses of land is normally done by concerned local governments. But only a few local governments have the money, staff and information needed to do comprehensive land-use planning.

There is an urgent need today for the local government to preserve Cebu’s hinterlands.

Local executives must have the political will to achieve the goal of ecological planning to help planners and citizens strike a balance among ecosystems—unmanaged natural ecosystems (wilderness, and mountains), managed multiple-use ecosystem (parks, estuaries, and some managed forests), managed productive ecosystems (farms, cattle ranches, other managed forests and surface mines), and managed urban ecosystems (cities and towns).

Gov. Gwen Garcia, who wants to make Cebu a tourism paradise, needs to control land use.

This control includes: direct purchase of land by the government or by private interests to ensure that it is used for the prescribed purposes; zoning land so it can be used only in certain ways; giving tax breaks to landowners who agree to use land only for given purposes such as agriculture or open space; and using environmental impact statements (EISs) to stop or delay harmful projects by forcing consideration of adverse impacts and alternatives to all national land-use projects.

The surest way to protect land from development or other potentially harmful uses is to arrange that land must be purchased by a government conservation agency or private foundation, corporation or individual.

There is now a need for the government to declare a series of new additional watershed areas to be able to sustain the supply of groundwater. Then President Ferdinand Marcos had issued a presidential decree prohibiting the use of any land with a slope of 60 percent other than for agriculture or silviculture.

Will Gov. Gwen Garcia and Mayor Tom Osmeña revive such decree?

A similar law may help prevent flooding in the costal areas.

Since World War II the typical pattern of a suburban housing development has been to bulldoze a patch of raw land and
build rows of houses, with each house having a standardized lot.

A new pattern, known as cluster development has been used to preserve moderate-sized blocks of open space. House, townhouses, condominiums and garden apartments are built on a relatively small portion of land, with the rest of the area left as open space, either in its natural state or for recreation areas. It is in the open space where rainfall percolates through the soil and replenish aquifers.