With Ruil Valencia Alabi and Emman Hulguin Magpusao reporting from Brooke’s Point. Satellite data and GIS analysis by Alvin Natividad.
(Last of 2 parts)
The scale beyond Saraza
Saraza is not the worst of it.
A satellite analysis of Barangay Ransang in the Municipality of Rizal conducted on the same date, April 21, 2026, shows 555.5 hectares of kaingin distributed across the barangay’s upland terrain. That is nearly twice the footprint documented in Saraza.
The red-classified polygons on the Ransang map cover the mid-slopes and interior ridges in a density that leaves little intact corridor between cleared patches. Multiple river systems run through the cleared land. The locator inset places Ransang in Rizal municipality, immediately north of Saraza.
The SIBOL study’s Business as Usual projections, which estimated that kaingin in Rizal municipality alone would expand from 187.54 to 818.14 hectares by 2028, were modeling a trend already visible in the 2023 baseline data.
The April 2026 Ransang satellite map suggests the trend has not slowed. At 555.5 hectares, Rizal is tracking toward, and may already have exceeded, the total projected kaingin extent the SIBOL study flagged as a crisis threshold.
Together, Saraza and Ransang show 841.07 hectares of kaingin within what is formally designated as a protected landscape.
A critical factor to forest recovery
Barangay Simpocan in Puerto Princesa City tells a different story.
According to satellite imagery as of April 21, 2026, Simpocan recorded 72.27 hectares of kaingin, a fraction of what the same satellite analysis found in Ransang and Saraza on the same date.
The map of Simpocan reads shows predominantly dark green forested terrain, with dispersed patches of red-classified clearing concentrated along the upper coastal slopes and separated by intact forest cover. The density of cleared polygons relative to total barangay area is visually incomparable to either Saraza or Ransang. The landscape, while not untouched, appears to be holding.
The difference between Simpocan and the two southern Palawan barangays is in the intervention that is being done on the ground.
Johnmart Salunday, president of Nagkakaisang mga Tribu ng Palawan, Inc. (Natripal), told Palawan News they have been undertaking an intensive campaign of information awareness along with enforcement since the area was devastated by Typhoon Odette in December 2021.
“Nagbuo kami ng Bantay CADT para mahinto yung mga iligal na pagputol ng mga puno,” he said. “Under the proyekto ng USAID malaki rin ang naitulong sa mga katutubo na pangalagaan ang lupaing ninuno at nakarecover ang mga gubat na sinalanta ng Odette nung 2021.” (We formed a Bantay CADT to stop illegal tree cutting. Under the USAID project, it also greatly helped the indigenous peoples to take care of their ancestral land, and the forests devastated by Odette in 2023 were able to recover.)
The Bantay CADT is a community-based forest patrol system that NATRIPAL helped establish in Simpocan and adjacent barangays, deputizing Tagbanua community members as wildlife enforcers empowered to monitor their own ancestral territory and report or confront illegal cutting. It is, in essence, the enforcement mechanism that the PAMB and PCSD have been unable to maintain at scale in the southern Palawan uplands.
The USAID project Salunday referenced is the INSPIRE project (Increasing the Sustainability of Palawan’s Indigenous Resources and Ecosystems) implemented through the Gerry Roxas Foundation with NATRIPAL as a key local partner. Following Typhoon Odette’s devastation of western Palawan in December 2021, USAID’s INSPIRE project provided emergency conservation grants to Tagbanua communities.
The result in Simpocan is a barangay where forest recovery is visibly underway. The dispersed red polygons in the Simpocan map, 72.27 hectares against a backdrop of intact green, are what reduced kaingin pressure looks like from satellite altitude when communities have both the organizational capacity to monitor their land and an economic alternative to burning it.
The three study sites go beyond the sum of their individual hectarage figures. They describe two different governance conditions operating simultaneously within the same island, on the same mountain system, in the same legal framework, on the same date.
In Saraza and Ransang, there was no community patrol system, no alternative livelihood program reaching farming households and no institutional mechanism to offer IP communities alternative livelihood.
In Simpocan, a Bantay CADT patrol system established by a people’s organization is giving the community both the capacity and the economic incentive to protect rather than clear forests.
The satellite maps of April 21, 2026 show three barangays under the same sky, two of them burning another is not. This is what has been done, or not done, to give communities the means and the reason to protect what remains. In Saraza, Bendina Awang has a hectare of burned hillside and a harvest coming in September. In Ransang, 555.5 hectares of cleared forest are visible from space and no enforcement is underway. In Simpocan, the Tagbanua are standing watch on their own land and the forest is coming back.
Dressler insists that decades of fieldwork on Palawan swidden established with considerable evidentiary weight that indigenous communities are not the reckless forest destroyers that enforcement narratives tend to cast them as. But while the established knowledge in the field argues that IP kaingin maintains landscape diversity, the situation in Saraza complicates that narrative.
What the drone image and satellite saw in Saraza and Rizal is an outcome, not necessarily a cause, he insists, and a compressed fallow is not necessarily a choice as it could be a symptom of land scarcity, of conservation zoning that has narrowed the territory available for rotation, or an economic incentive that a farming family would not readily admit. Poverty can induce its own silence and the economic desperation can drive a farmer beyond his traditional boundaries.
