BANTAY
GOBYERNO
Ike
Señeres
The Philippine
Sustainable Development Council (PCSD) and the Climate Change Commission (CCC)
are two separate government agencies. The PCSD is under the National Economic
Development Authority (NEDA) while the CCC is under the Office of the President
(OP).
Knowing how it is in
the government, they would have their own turfs, and they would have their own
reporting lines, if you know what I mean. Under normal circumstances, that
should not be a problem, because the President of the Philippines who is on top
of the OP is also the Chairman of the NEDA. Besides, there is still the Cabinet
where all line agencies could meet and thresh out agenda items, depending on
the level of priority.
Although the
PCSD and the CCC are two separate agencies and they each have their own
corporate purposes, it is also a well known fact that climate change has
directly something to do with sustainable development, not unless you are one
of those who denies the existence of the former, or one of those who does not
give a damn about the latter.
If you ask me however,
I will even tell you that vice versa, sustainable development has directly
something to do with climate change, not unless you are one of those who could
not tell the difference between progress and development, or whose idea of
climate change is going through spring and summer, or changing from sunny to
rainy weather.
I am sure that
there are many direct correlations between sustainable development and climate
change and vice versa, but the most obvious I think is that the negative
effects of climate change could hamper or prevent sustainable development.
Conversely, the gains of development could be destroyed by climate change, to
the extent that these would no longer be sustainable.
Just for the record
however, I would like to make it clear that as of the year 2015 or thereabouts,
the scope of sustainable development is no longer limited to the environment.
2015 was the year when the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were
launched, wherein the scope was expanded beyond the environment.
It is important to
understand that climate change is the result of a cause and effect
relationship, meaning to say that climate change is the effect of many factors
that cause the change to happen. Many say that climate change is no longer
preventable because it will happen anyway no matter what we do, and the only
thing that we could really do is to lessen the causes so that the climate
change that would happen would not be so severe, in other words its effects
would be lessened.
Well, this is not
really a damn if you do, damn if you don’t situation, because we have the
chance to be less damned, if we do more to prevent the worsening of climate
change.
Out of the 17 SDGs,
only four could be considered as environment related, and these are Clean Water
and Sanitation (Goal 6), Climate Action (Goal 13), Life below Water (Goal 14)
and Life on Land (Goal 15). While it is generally understood that the
attainment of the 17 SDGs is directly under the responsibility of the NEDA and
or the PCSD, only one of these goals, namely Climate Action could be said to be
the direct responsibility of the CCC.
That however is
debatable, because there are many other SDGs that are within the purview of the
CCC, either directly or indirectly. Examples of these are Affordable and Clean
Energy (Goal 7), Sustainable Cities and Communities (Goal 11) and Responsible
Consumption and Production (Goal 12).
2015 was also the year
when the time frame for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ended, the 8
goals that started in the year 2000. Fifteen years after it started, and when
it ended in 2015, it was clear that the Philippines failed to meet most of the
goals, never mind the numbers.
What is important to
know is that the Philippines is a signatory to the Charter of the United
Nations, being actually one of its founders and therefore we should really take
these goals seriously. Having learned our lessons from what did not happen in
the case of the MDGs, we should now rally the nation so
that on or before the year 2030, we would already meet all of the SDGs and not
just some, mind you.
It is good to note
that the present Administration has revived the Legislative-Executive
Development Advisory Council (LEDAC). Perhaps not by coincidence, the NEDA is
also the Secretariat of the LEDAC, in much the same way as it is the
Secretariat of the PCSD.
Even if it could
possibly happen that these two Secretariats would have their own turfs within
the same organization, we could still hope that the Director General of the NEDA
would do something to harmonize the two. The next time that the LEDAC meets,
they could hopefully discuss the re-composition of the PCSD, because it should
now include other members that are not just environment related.
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