Iloilo’s greenbelt law needs a second reading

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Three weeks after the mayor signed the Coastal Greenbelt Zone ordinance, a list of 25 proposed amendments landed in front of me. Twenty-five amendments are a lot for a law three weeks old.

The ordinance passed on July 1 and was signed a week later. The amendments come from Dr. Rex Sadaba, a renowned University of the Philippines Visayas scientist, drafted as part of the implementing rules and regulations.

Credit where it is owed, first. Only about 127 local governments in the country have coastal greenbelt ordinances at all, and the National Coastal Greenbelt Bill has been stalled in Congress across several sessions. Iloilo City did not wait nor waste time to pass a responsive version of the law.

Councilor Romel Duron’s ordinance put a 100-meter buffer over 32 coastal barangays, set aside roughly 110 hectares of mangrove in Bito-on, Balabago, and Hinactacan, and banned reclamation outright inside those zones. That is more than most cities have managed, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

But the amendments are not mere copyediting or spell-checking, and reading them straight through makes that obvious. They rewrite the Declaration of Policy, replace the definition of beach forest, and stretch the legal scope from mangroves alone to eight ecosystem types.

Amendment 19 is the one that stayed with me. It notes that Acacia farnesiana, an introduced species, fell within the enacted definition of a Philippine beach forest. That is what happens when the law gets drafted first and the scientists are convened afterward.

None of the underlying science is in dispute. Equally renowned scientists Jurgenne H. Primavera and J.M.A. Esteban put the long-term survival of planted mangroves in this country at 10 to 20 percent, and traced most of the failure to a single habit: pushing Rhizophora propagules into sandy, exposed shorelines that belong to Avicennia and Sonneratia. Planting then ran past USD 500 per hectare, half of it swallowed by administration and supervision.

Duron’s own reason for leaving Villa Baybay out of the zone — sandy substrate, wrong habitat — is correct. It also quietly indicts years of ceremonial planting across Western Visayas, and I have covered enough of those mornings to recognize what he is describing.

Somebody should count those sites. The records are held by CENRO and DENR Region 6, and they can be overlaid on the shoreline classification the amendments now require.

Two things still need fixing.

The first is the instrument. Implementing rules implement. They do not amend. A graduated penalty system, mandatory restoration at the violator’s expense, a No Net Loss clause, prohibited acts extended to dunes and strand vegetation — these create liabilities that did not exist when the council voted.

Duron himself said the body “may amend the ordinance” if it decides to bring Villa Baybay in, which concedes the point. File the amendatory ordinance. Calendar time is cheap. Losing the city’s first enforcement case on a technicality is not.

The second is Amendment 13. Replacing a fixed 100 meters with a width determined by “ecological assessment, shoreline geomorphology, coastal hazard exposure, existing land use, and socio-economic considerations” is sound ecology and risky politics.

The first three criteria are testable. The last two are the ones a developer’s consultant can populate, and I would rather say that now than write about it later.

The pressure on this coast is documented. BFAR approved two fishpond leases covering more than 60 hectares in Barangay Bito-on in January 2025, in the very barangay the ordinance now protects, while the council was looking into homestead patents over roughly 50 hectares of Jaro mangrove.

The Greenbelt Committee is chaired by the mayor. Flexible widths without the No Net Loss clause — which the draft itself lists as a gap rather than a provision — is not flexibility. It is subtraction with a footnote.

So pair them. Let the widths flex only where no net loss binds. Publish every width determination together with its technical basis. Give the Scientific Advisory Panel a signature, not a seat.

Then there is the money. PHP 5 million, appropriated once, out of a PHP 4.5 billion city budget for 2026. Roughly one-tenth of one percent, to cover ecosystem mapping, shoreline classification, habitat suitability assessment, two inventories, invasive species management, and nine restoration indicators.

The World Bank’s 2017 valuation put the flood-protection service of Philippine mangroves at about USD 3,200 per hectare per year, which would make the 110 hectares already within the zone worth north of PHP 20 million per year. That is a national average based on older data, so I would treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a budget line. It is still a better argument than any speech I have heard on the subject.

Put greenbelt implementation in the 2027 Annual Investment Program, and keep it there.

Duron did the hard part by passing something. What is left is the unglamorous work: a second ordinance, a recurring budget line, and a public record of who decided what this coastline is worth.

The experts Mayor Raisa Treñas promised to convene should be reading that draft, not receiving it.