Officials Mark Anniversary With Ceremony At Which They Announce The Rehabilitation Is Finally About To Begin

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

Pasig River Rehabilitation Authority Celebrates Twenty Fifth Year Of Imminent Rehabilitation

MANILA — The Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission marked its twenty-fifth anniversary Tuesday with a ceremony at the river’s banks at which Commission Chairman Ferdinand Recio-Ledesma announced that the Pasig River’s long-awaited comprehensive rehabilitation was “now closer than it has ever been” and that “the conditions for successful full rehabilitation are finally in place.”

The twenty-fifth anniversary ceremony was the fifteenth anniversary ceremony at which a Commission Chair has announced that the conditions for successful full rehabilitation were finally in place. The river has been the subject of comprehensive rehabilitation plans, partial rehabilitation efforts, pilot rehabilitation projects, and rehabilitation coordination meetings since the Commission was established in 1999.

Commission Chairman Recio-Ledesma, who has held the position for three years, told the assembled guests that the Commission had “learned from twenty-five years of experience” and that the lessons learned had produced “a new approach that will be different from previous approaches.” He did not specify what the previous approaches had been or how the new approach differed.

The river behind him, visible during the ceremony, was visibly the same river it has been for twenty-five years of rehabilitation planning. The ceremony included the launching of a commemorative motorized banca into the river, whose occupants wore face masks due to the odor.

The History

The Pasig River’s rehabilitation history is, by the Commission’s own documentation, extensive. The Commission’s 1999 establishment followed years of deterioration that had made the river, by various assessments in the 1990s, one of the most polluted urban waterways in Asia. The 1999 establishment was accompanied by an initial rehabilitation plan with specific targets for water quality improvement over ten years.

By 2009, the ten-year targets had not been met, but the Commission noted “significant progress in specific indicators” and announced a revised ten-year plan. By 2019, the revised ten-year targets had been “substantially approached” and a new comprehensive framework was announced with “achievable and time-bound targets for full ecological restoration.” The twenty-fifth anniversary ceremony marks five years into this framework.

By the Commission’s own 2024 assessment, water quality in the Pasig River has improved from its 1999 baseline by approximately 28 percent across its standard indicators. The river’s water quality remains, by the same assessment, substantially below the Commission’s 1999 original targets, the 2009 revised targets, and the 2019 framework targets. Full rehabilitation, the Commission’s current trajectory analysis suggests, may be achievable “within fifteen to twenty years, assuming sustained funding and coordination.”

This kind of sustained improvement trajectory that consistently approaches targets without reaching them is consistent with a long tradition of environmental rehabilitation programs that demonstrate measurable improvement while receding from their stated goals at approximately the rate at which they approach them.

The New Approach

The “new approach” that Chairman Recio-Ledesma announced at the anniversary ceremony consists, by the documents distributed at the event, of three elements. First, enhanced inter-agency coordination through a newly constituted Inter-Agency Technical Working Group on Pasig River Rehabilitation, which will meet quarterly. Second, a “community-based monitoring system” in which barangay officials along the river will report on visible pollution incidents. Third, a renegotiation of the Commission’s funding arrangement with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

The Inter-Agency Technical Working Group is the fourth such coordinating body established since 1999. The previous three coordinating bodies are not, by available Commission records, formally dissolved; they have simply not met in several years. The community-based monitoring system is similar to systems established in 2007 and 2014, both of which produced initial monitoring activity that declined over time as the barangay officials involved had other priorities. The funding renegotiation has been a recurring item in the Commission’s annual agenda since 2012.

The River’s Perspective

The Pasig River, which has been the subject of twenty-five years of rehabilitation planning and cannot therefore be asked for comment, continues to flow through Metro Manila carrying, by the Commission’s own monitoring data, substantially more coliform bacteria, heavy metals, and dissolved oxygen deficit than the Commission’s targets require. The river supports, by the same monitoring data, limited aquatic life compared to its pre-industrial state. It receives daily inputs of waste from approximately the same sources it has received them from since 1999.

The river has been, by all accounts, consistent. The rehabilitation planning has similarly been consistent, in its own way.

This is consistent with a wider pattern in environmental management where the continuity of the planning process provides an institutional framework that persists independently of its relationship to the environmental outcomes it nominally addresses.

The Anniversary Events

In addition to the ceremony at the river, the twenty-fifth anniversary included: a photo exhibition of the river’s condition over twenty-five years (the photos showed modest improvement); a panel discussion on “lessons learned and the path forward” (the panel discussed lessons that were consistent with lessons from previous panels); and a commitment-signing ceremony in which representatives of fourteen government agencies signed a renewed commitment to Pasig River rehabilitation (four of the fourteen agencies have signed similar commitments in previous years).

For more on Philippine environmental program management, see The Daily Mash for related British river cleanup coverage.

The Commission’s twenty-sixth year begins tomorrow. The new approach begins when funding is confirmed.

SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire