“Project: Clean Water”

The GreenPeace, an independent global campaigning organisation that acts to the change attitudes and behavior, to protect and conserve the environment to promote peace, launched “Project: Clean Water’, an initiative that aims to catalyze action to protect the fresh water sources here in the Philippines, focusing on the issues of water pollution especially on the surface water scarcity, freshwater sources and the drinking water we consume everyday. It also review the current policy in the country’s framworks for water use, quality control, and management.

Based on the research made by GreeenPeace:

1.       the quality of fresh water sources is steadily declining while the costs of obtaining clean water is rising

2.      although many laws have been enacted to protect water, such as the Clean Water Act, these are among the most blatantly abused environmental laws because of poor enforcement; and

3.      although government agencies monitor water quality, the parameters are severely limited and do not include many toxic substances from new technologies, including some of the most harmful compounds known to humans, such as persistent organic pollutants or POPs; and

4.      declining water quality is compounded by the problem of water scarcity which is now a very palpable threat, making access to clean water more and more difficult.

Based on some reseaches done by the Greenpeace, our country, the Philippines, ranked 2^nd lowest among the countries in the the South East Asia in freshwater availability. This tells that our country had a deficiency in having freshwater that the Filipinos need for everyday living. The experts also predicted that some of our freshwater sources will have freshwater deficit such as river basins in Pampanga and Agno, in Pasig-Laguna and many more. This shortage is due to the climate change happening nowadays and water pollution that our government is having problem on managing and controlling it.

Also said on the given research that even the existing policies and management by the government which was the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has no substantial improvement at all and continuous decline of quality clean freshwater. The DENR acknowledge the 50 or 421 rivers in the country ( 8.42%) are considered  “biologically dead” due to pollution. The government had an agency that monitors the pollutants in water bodies but it still not enough to save those dead rivers because the miss out the toxic compounds happened to affect those water surfaces. Because of lack of budget and equipment that’s why they can’t control the said dilemma.

Sources:

www.philippinestoday.net/index.php?module=article&view=634

www.greenpeace.org/seasia/ph/

Lowell Royce Y. Dagaraga

4IT-B