The recent 15th Festival of Trees (FOT-15) has raised funds to rehabilitate and reforest one of the major sources of drinking water from the endangered rainforests of Northeastern Metro Manila and Rizal province, as the annual fund raiser highlighted efforts last year in assisting flood-prone urbanized areas in Northwestern Manila and farflung public elementary schools in Central and Western Mindanao in the Southern Philippines.
A decade and a half after the first FOT in 1996, the annual society event has raised funds to help reforest more than half of the 28,000-hectare aquifer serving Marikina City in Eastern Manila and Antipolo City in Rizal, especially in the aftermath of the Typhoon Ondoy-Ketsana tragedy last year.
The Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), the nation’s largest corporate-led social development foundation, has been the recipient of various FOT undertakings led by the Makati Garden Club (MGC), like helping raise funds for the building of drainage systems in a flood-prone housing estate in urban Malabon City after the 14th FOT in 2009.
The fund-raising festival also helped provide textbooks and chairs for at least 1,720 schoolchildren in Maguindanao province in Central Mindanao and Basilan province in the Southwestern Philippines, two of the less fortunate provinces of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
For 15 years, the ladies of the Makati Garden Club have been using their stature in society to raise millions of pesos to benefit various poverty-reduction projects of PBSP. The FOT has evolved to be the top fund-raising gala event in Manila, and to date has raised close to a hundred million pesos to support PBSP programs in Cebu Hillylands, Maqueda Bay in Samar, the Bicol region, and areas in Mindanao.
The year 2010 is also the joint Ruby anniversaries of the Makati Garden Club and PBSP, both established in 1970. The theme for FOT-15 is What a Wonderful World.
In past years, Christmas trees were decorated and auctioned off to raise money, and the auction was expanded to art works. In the last few years, prizes included premier resort accommodations to Amanpulo and overseas destinations.
In one FOT year, the art auction included masterpieces from Anita Magsaysay-Ho that attracted collectors from Singapore, and donations raised during that year funded PBSP’s Samar technology center which has developed aquaculture technology to benefit fisherfolk primarily in the Visayas.
Business tycoon Manuel V. Pangilinan, chair of the PBSP Board of Trustees, together with PBSP executive director Rafael C. Lopa led the 15th FOT on Tuesday evening (Nov. 23) at the Manila Polo Club along McKinley Road in Forbes Park, Makati City.
In his keynote speech, Pangilinan cited the FOT’s contribution to Project Escuelas last year which provided Muslim Mindanao schoolchildren with 1,600 textbooks and 200 chairs to help decongest crowded classrooms in at least six public schools in Lamitan, Basilan and in Datu Abdullah Sangki and Datu Paglas, Maguindanao.
Through the Project Escuelas initiative, these new chairs and textbooks have helped both teachers and students in the two ARMM provinces to improve the conduct and quality of their academic exercise in a spacious classroom now more conducive to learning.
He also pointed out that the FOT last year assisted urban poor household from a total membership of 560 housing associations in the four-hectare Maysilo estate-village in Malabon, which has been perennially affected with floods during heavy rains and rising seawater.
The FOT donated the funds which facilitated the construction of 250 linear meters of road running parallel 250 equal meters of a water drainage system to mitigate the effects of heavy flooding in this urbanized community in Sitio Rosal, Barangay Maysilo, with 115 households occupying 7,000 square meters of the 4.2-hectare Maysilo estate.
Of the 28,000 hectares in the Marikina watershed, fund raisers have aimed to cover at least 54 percent or more than half (around 15,120 hectares) of the aquifer, as the minimum required forest cover to mitigate any rainfall rampage or prevent the onslaught of another Ondoy.
But the Marikina watershed now has an estimated remaining rainforest cover of only a fifth or around 20 percent (more or less 5,600 hectares), as the FOT aims to reforest more than a third or around 34 percent (about 9,520 hectares) to complete the minimum 54-percent forest cover requirement.
The Marikina Watershed Initiative of the Philippine Disaster Recovery Foundation (PDRF) began with 600 hectares, setting up community-based seedling nurseries and initial livelihood programs for the local residents and indigenous community, primarily through the adopt-a-hectare nursery package.
The watershed initiative has also helped develop an integrated watershed management plan to reforest the Marikina-Antipolo aquifer, involving an estimated 6.7 million trees and 1.3 million required annual seedlings in a reforestation target for the next five years. (PBSP)
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