Redundant audit body

The news report “Green auditor to check green projects if real or fake” (Inquirer, 8/7/11) raises some questions about the role of the Commission on Climate Change (CCC). Isn’t it an added expense from the national budget? All we need is for the concerned agencies, with the help of the rest of the citizens, to be really primed and well-coordinated to face the challenges of climate change.

Mary Anne Lucille Sering, CCC’s vice chair, said that the Commission on Audit (COA) can only do numbers, not green auditing. I think that COA can and must be oriented to do green auditing. After all, it is about time every government agency became green-oriented in our climate change-challenged time.

Sering, who was undersecretary for legal affairs when Joselito Atienza was secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, also said that being understaffed, the CCC will have to “team up with civil society organizations” and with the private sector for research on the development of locally manufactured electric buses, to do “green audit.”

With the COA reoriented to do green audit, it can then check on the DENR, for example, which for its part, should also commit to do its job well. After all, it is already “teaming up” not only with civil society but with people’s organizations (POs). These should be the best groups to ensure that the seedlings grow into trees in their own communities. There may be some exception as cited by Sering, about a Palawan mayor’s claim that his constituents “(cut) down greenery in their area for a place to plant seedlings” just so they could get “a piece of the cake” from a “massive government reforestation project,” but the POs in general can best be depended on to protect their genuine interests while the DENR, the Philippine National Police and the local government must do their part in preventing abuses.

Under Atienza, with Sering as his legal adviser, questionable special permits for large-scale mining in the South, all given to foreigners, were reportedly granted. In the North, my Bulacan townmates bewailed Atienza’s lifting of the suspension that the late Angelo Reyes imposed on marble quarrying in Biak-na-Bato. What about all those establishments emitting toxics to the air or into the waters, those garbage dumps in otherwise productive areas? What happened to the laws on ecological waste management, clean air, clean water, and so on during Sering’s stint with the DENR?

Also with the CCC is Undersecretary Yeb Saño from the World Wildlife Fund who was seen on TV praising former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) in one of her State of the Nation Addresses. Arroyo is pro-mining and did nothing about illegal logging. President Aquino should closely scrutinize the backgrounds of his appointees who could become his Achilles’ heel. Saño is the son of a Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority official appointed by GMA.

—NOEL DE LEON,
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