(This story was produced with support from FYT as part of their solutions journalism grant.)
Straddling the intersection of Baguio City and Benguet’s capital La Trinidad is 335 hectares of forest cover. This is the Busol watershed, which handles roughly a full quarter of the water requirements of Baguio’s residents, and is the seventh among the Philippines’ internal list of protected areas. Covered largely in Benguet pine (Pinus kesiya), the watershed has long stood as an area of largely unexploited nature despite the presence of settlers.
The Busol watershed stores a large amount of the torrential rains that fall into the Baguio and La Trinidad portions of Benguet; however, despite the significant amount of rains received annually, Baguio continues to have to grapple with growing water scarcity. Coupled with the increasing clamor for environmental concern among both government and public spheres, more and more attention has been poured into the preservation of the watersheds of the province, Busol among them.
Even as the present people have turned more attention to the preservation of Baguio’s remaining greenery as the effects of climate change make itself more known, the preservation of Busol has remained a difficult task.
Busol and residents
In the Cordillera region, forest land has historically been converted into agricultural and residential land, or subject to logging either for local use or for industry. While Busol watershed has been a protected area for decades, the area still remains subject to exploitation and more commonly conversion of small portions into residential infrastructure by the community that lives within the area.
In November 1992, then-president Fidel Ramos signed Proclamation No. 93, designating Buyog as a protected area. Four parcels of land with a total area of 199,315 square meters or 19 hectares comprise the Baguio portion of the watershed, in the northern part of the Summer Capital.
As of the latest tracking conducted by the federation of barangays within or adjoining the Busol watershed reservation, some 758 residential structures are located within Busol’s Baguio portion, with an estimated 4,5000 residents in the area on the Baguio side alone.
Many of these residents have been around for decades, and several families and clans even have ancestral land claims in the area, making the preservation of the watershed an even more tenuous task as all efforts to preserve the place have to contend with land ownership and ancestral domain concerns.
Majority of attempts to properly preserve the watershed have been met with resistance from the residents, with the federations of barangays in the area filing opposition to any major legislation attempting to forestall further utilization of Busol’s greenery.
Fencing efforts have been undertaken since the 1990s to protect the watershed, but a complete, comprehensive fence has yet to take place.
In 2022, in response to an attempt to fence off the watershed completely and make illegal any unauthorized entry to it, the Busol residents filed position papers and sought aid from local politicians to protect their rights to continue exploiting the watershed’s resources, citing century-old ancestral claims from four claimants as preceding Proclamation No. 15, which established the Busol Forest Reservation in 1922.
“Imagine your own existing dwelling or similar property very dear to you being fenced against your will and with a matching signage installed thereat,” the federation wrote in their defense, calling for the fencing to at the very least, if not cancel, then exclude the portions currently claimed or settled by residents, many of whom cite ancestral land claims.
While the matter has been embattled since the plan was first floated, as have many other initiatives to increase the protection of the watershed, residents have continued to slowly encroach deeper into greenery.
Bringing back the old ways
While the forest cover has partly stayed intact, it still has experienced decades of encroachment from the 4,500-odd residents, leading to initiative upon initiative to attempt to stop the construction of more infrastructure in Busol, and the cutting of more Benguet pines.
Majority of these initiatives are sponsored by and enacted by the government, but the fight for meters of forest has historically and currently involved multiple non-government sectors.
Even prior to the more recent pushes to help protect Busol, the city has previously enacted its Eco-Walk project, an old initiative where young students would be immersed in Busol’s forests in the 90s. This initiative has been returned to life in 2023, when members of the Baguio City Broadcasters Club (BCBC), led in particular by journalist Arthur Tibaldo, revived the 1992 activity, which was also largely brainstormed into existence by then-members of the media.
The Eco-Walk is an annual effort to not only immerse the city’s youth in nature, but also to have them aid with tree-planting efforts using seedlings drawn from the government’s Benguet pine seedling stock, and to impress upon them early the value of nature and its preservation. Eco-Walk organizers and environmentalists credit the Eco-Walk in part with the environmental valuation and activism present in Baguio’s youth nowadays, though with most of the records of the original iterations of the walk lost owing to the death of its longest overseer, it is hard to know how many children in Baguio went through the Eco-Walk and subsequently developed into environmentally-aware forest protectors in their adulthoods.
The Eco-Walk as it originally was referenced and emulated indigenous methods of forest management, with Tibaldo saying that recovered manuals from the late Ramon Dacawi and Peppot Ilagan and the other organizers of the original Eco-Walk drew from things such as the indigenous Ifugao practice of “muyong” land zoning and cherry-picking of select trees for culling to sustain their wood-based industries, as well as other indigenous techniques of forest management from Mountain Province and Apayao’s own ancestral communities. It lasted decades under the watchful supervision of its overseers from the BCBC, until it stopped in 2018, in part due to the ailing health of Dacawi, who passed away in 2019; Ilagan had passed long before in 2003 of natural causes.
Both iterations of the Eco-Walk, however, have noted struggles to gain ground regardless of the regular planting of more Benguet pine; the forest cover at best remains the same as between the continued usage and felling of trees by the 4,500-odd residents currently in the area and the low survival rate of seedlings planted during Eco-Walks.
Fighting for seven hectares
With the consistent and continued utilization of the protected forest zone’s greenery, the current administration of Baguio has made the preservation of what environment Baguio continues to have one of its biggest priorities.
One of the significant moves to protect Busol’s forest cover was the establishment of a proper inventory of trees, first manual and then digitized. Some 5,000-odd trees have been tagged as present in Baguio’s portion of the watershed as of the inventory conducted by the city government in partnership with the dwellers of the barangays in the area.
However, even with the recorded increase city-wide of some 50,000 trees across the past five years, Busol remains in a losing fight. 2023 figures from Baguio’s environmental offices showed losses of forest cover in Busol, with conservative estimates accounting for at least 12 hectares of lost forest. Over the years, the 19 hectares of initial Busol forest cover had dwindled to some 7 hectares left intact.
Efforts to demolish illegal structures have taken place around the clock since the 90s; around the time of the original Eco-Walk.
Around the same time as the revival of the Eco-Walk in 2023, the current administration of Baguio decided to step up its preservation game. Only a few months before the Eco-Walk, in March of 2023, Baguio’s incumbent mayor Benjamin Magalong issued a new edict – the establishment of round-the-clock patrols in Busol, particularly in the areas of the four barangays adjacent to the forest, in a bid to stop further encroachment.
Prior to the tipping point where patrols became “necessary,” the government had had prior arrangements with residents and officials of the four villages. In 2016, the local government had signed an agreement with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), Baguio Water District (BWD), which taps the watershed for a quarter of the city’s water, and Busol residents, which was intended to preserve the forest reservation while the concerned agencies segregated the portions of the watershed earmarked as residential land.
This agreement with watershed occupants had them agree to no longer dip further into the forest cover and put up more structures; however, said structures continued to pop up nonetheless across the years and were spotted in routine inspections.
In 2021 inspections alone, 16 new structures of varying size were spotted, and demolitions were slated and partly carried out. Baguio has had a policy of demolishing structures in the watershed outside of the recognized residential areas, drawing legal casus belli from a February 2009 Supreme Court ruling empowering the city to enact demolitions in the watershed.
Constant vigilance
With the pandemic finally being relegated largely to a solved problem by 2023, resources were now freed up to other exploits. Returning to the encroachment upon Busol, Magalong issued a hardline stance on the part of the city government with regards to residents overstepping their acknowledged and accepted territories amid court cases covering ancestral land claims and informal settlers.
Under the new stance, Baguio adopted a no-tolerance policy of demolish-on-sight; the Anti-Squatting and Anti-Illegal Structure Committee had been empowered to expedite the removal of illegal structures inside the city’s remaining watersheds and forest reservations.
In April of 2023, Magalong issued a new order to the local enforcement authorities – the police were now mandated to regularly conduct on-site patrols, going around weekly and for brief periods of time during the initial months of patrol as often as daily. 24/7 police presence was established for the initial months, hell-bent on catching any and all tree-felling and construction within the remaining 7 hectares of forest.
The patrols saw success in terms of spotting illegal construction work – from 16 structures reported in 2021, with some demolished, another 26 were noted in 2023. This was the catalyst for the hardline stance of the city; Magalong had subsequently warned that in addition to just demolition, the city would now file charges against residents who continued to violate the agreement and put up infrastructure or otherwise fell trees for whatever purpose.
Since the patrols were enacted, fewer and fewer illegal structures have been noted; in 2024 to date, only a single incident of illegal construction and excavation has been recorded. Said incident took place in January and was quickly stopped by the police patrols.
Reclaiming the 12
Even as the city continues to enact constant vigilance in the form of patrols and harsh penalties for people who would cut into Busol, efforts are being undertaken to reclaim the lost hectares of forest cover.
The Eco-Walk, having returned last year in 2023, is prominent in this effort as it includes the planting of Benguet pine seedlings, which are propagated and multiplied in the city’s various seedling nurseries, one of which is situated in Busol itself.
With environmental preservation being in this season, non-government organizations, city agencies and law-keepers alike now partake in regular tree-planting activities; not all are in Busol but some are, in attempts to recover the original forest cover of the watershed.
Budgets have also been earmarked for the recovery of Busol, to the tune of at least P11 million a year. The green space is currently under a set of initiatives intended for growth including the establishment of a management plan for the watershed, the development of eco-friendly green infrastructure and protective structures for Busol such as a greenhouse, and the repair of the existing fencing efforts, even though said fences do not cover the entirety of the watershed.
The remaining trees are currently being taken into inventory as well, to ensure that each tree is accounted for and more importantly, tracked in case they are cut down; this initiative is in partnership with the city’s water district, the local government, and the academe present in Baguio.
However, the fate of Busol watershed and the green of Baguio is now in the hands of the community in partnership with the city.
“Since 1992, the Baguio Regreening Movement was formed to regreen whatever vacant parts of the City of Baguio that can be planted with trees. This time around, we see green,” says Tibaldo, now chief overseer of the Eco-Walk program.
