A $10 million grant from the Korea International Cooperation Agency is funding a new environmental monitoring program of the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development Staff aimed at tracking climate-related changes and water movement across Palawan.
The grant is meant to solve a basic problem in Palawan: the province does not have enough ground-based data to track what is happening to its weather, water, and soil in real time.
Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) Staff Executive Director Atty. Teodoro Jose Matta said the program will monitor activities linked to weather patterns and the movement of water from land to the atmosphere.
He said that in the initial phase, monitoring equipment will be installed in five municipalities to study 12 locations.
“Nagsimula na ang ating implementation this year, in fact our KOICA experts were just here yesterday, and we will be establishing monitoring equipment in five municipalities, a total of 12 monitoring sites—weather, water movement and soil studies will be conducted real time,” Matta said.
He said that they will have municipal information available real time to the local government units (LGUs), the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, and the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration among other agencies, including the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
Currently, much of the weather information used by local agencies comes from satellite data or national monitoring systems of PAGASA.
While useful, these systems do not always capture detailed, location-specific conditions in every municipality or barangay in Palawan.
He pointed out that the project will run for three years and is now in its first phase.
Monitoring stations will eventually be set up in all municipalities in the province, including Puerto Princesa City.
“Right now, we are just revising the plan, the equipment are going to come in this year. It’s a three-year program and phase 1 pa lang and magkakaroon ng phase 2,” he said.
Once fully implemented, all weather-related information will come directly from the monitoring stations in Palawan and can be shared quickly with concerned agencies for faster response.
“Hindi na galing satellite, sa PAGASA, galing na sa Palawan mismo. So ang munisipyo, real time, instant. Alam nila kung ano na ang nangyayari sa barangay,” he said.
Matta also said that despite the limited budget of PCSD Staff, the agency continues to carry out programs through grants from international partners.
He explained that these grants are not released as direct cash to them but are used by funding agencies to implement key programs.
“Para mas transparent yung transactions at saka yung grant and implementation of the projects, the funders are usually also the people or agency that disperse the grants. Kami, point and shoot lang, ito yung kailangan namin, ito yung programa namin, sila ang gagastos. And it works well for us, and nakikita natin na yung tiwala ng ibang bansa, nandoon sa amin,” he said.
He added that PCSDS also works with other partners.
“So kasi from researches from marine resource initiative, from KOICA, of course nandyan pa rin ang one of our oldest partners, the US International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau which handles our training and capacity-building as far as our enforcement side is concerned,” he added.
