Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
7.1
Scope and Coverage
•
The NAP emphasizes the critical value of water in sustaining land productivity
•
The NAP provides conscious effort to ensure both quality and quantity of water
resources and how they impact on the final quality of safe food products.
•
The NAP focuses on highly degraded lands and critical watershed areas located in
vulnerable areas. The vulnerable areas are generally areas under Type I climate,
which has distinct wet and dry seasons; moderately degraded areas under Type
III climate and selected El Nino/Drought prone provinces under Type II and Type
IV climate.
7.2
Program Components and Proposed Action Programs
The formulation of the National Action Plan is designed to provide clear under-
standing of the need for harmonizing actions of local communities and government
units and make them aware that managing watershed would require sharing of
responsibilities in protecting the trans-boundary river systems, the primary source of
freshwater, that cuts across more than one province and municipality as they drain
towards the sea.
There are five program components identified under the
Philippine NAP
(Table
15.5
).
8
Government Response to Problems of Land Degradation
and Loss
Assessment of Land Degradation at the National level by the Bureau of Soil and
Water Management (BSWM) is on-going. The national level data represents several
decades of BSWM efforts to assess the state of land degradation in the country. It
took more than 30 years to complete its soil resources assessment of the country.
Currently, updated land degradation assessments are done at project levels, e.g.
SAFDZ-CLUP integration, various watershed projects such as those collaborative
with JICA and ACIAR.
A major output of the third JICA-BSWM technical cooperation (2001-2005)
was the development of the Agricultural Resources Information System (ARIS).
The ARIS integrates the earlier completed Soil Information System (SIS) and the
Land Resources Information System (LARIS). The ARIS framework consists of
data, query, and model subsystems. Nowadays, to update its data, it does not need
to resort to direct field survey methodology again. There are now GIS and remote
sensing technologies that BSWM uses. A sample land degradation assessment at
local level: Inabanga, Bohol Watershed (completed BSWM-ACIAR project) using
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