SBMA employees plant 7,000 trees as P60-B ‘green investment’

By Henry Empeño
Correspondent

SUBIC BAY FREEPORT—In about five years, most of the Subic Bay Freeport will be abloom, and fruits will be dangling from some 7,000 trees that would line up the main roads from the Subic gateway to Cubi Point and up to the Naval Magazine area.

More than that, in about 50 years, the mango, acacia, narra and even the lowly banaba trees planted by employees of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) over the past two months would have been worth more than P60 billion. And that value wouldn’t even include the timber, fruits and beauty to be derived from the trees. “This is our green investment,” explained Amethya de la Llana-Koval, manager of the SBMA Ecology Center, the lead unit in the tree-planting program.

“It’s basically our way of reducing the environmental footprint of industry and commerce in the Subic Freeport, but we also see it as an investment in aesthetics, food production and ecological balance,” she added.

Citing estimates by a professor at the University of Calcutta, the SBMA Ecology Center said a single tree could be worth $193,250—or a whooping P8.6 million each—because of the environmental value it provides.

“A full-grown tree can remove as much as 12 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year,” Koval said. “In 50 years of its lifetime, a tree could control air pollution to the tune of $62,000 and generate oxygen worth $31,250,” she added.

Moreover, a single tree in 50 years could prevent soil erosion and increase soil fertility worth $31,250, recycle $37,000 worth of water, and provide home for animals at $31,250, the same estimate indicated.

With these figures, the 7,000 trees planted by SBMA employees this planting season “could easily be worth more than P60 billion,” Koval said.

Factor in the thousands more planted under the annual tree-planting activities here and the SBMA “adopt-a-forest” program involving business locators and community groups in Subic, “then we would have billions and billions in green investment,” she said.

SBMA forester Pat Escusa Jr., who coordinated the agency’s recent tree-planting activity, said some 3,000 employees from several departments took two hours off every Friday for the last two months to plant a total of 7,038 trees—an average of two seedlings per employee.

The species planted included fruit-bearers like mango, cashew, jackfruit and chico, as well as ornamental ones like fire tree, golden shower, banaba, narra and mahogany—all grown out of a small tree nursery maintained by the Ecology Center at Subic’s El Kabayo area.

“We’re taking this thing seriously, not just for photo-ops,” Escusa said, pointing out that the Ecology Center had specified the planting pattern, the spaces between saplings, as well as the planting procedure for each of the eight batches of tree planters.

The planting spaces, Escusa said, varied from four to 10 meters apart depending on the species, while the planting pattern varied according to the area planted.

In places near tourism facilities like the golf course, a preponderance of flowering trees were planted to enhance the landscape, with some mango and acacia alternating in between.

In residential areas, mahogany was selected for planting, while fruit-bearing trees were set aside for hilly terrain and remote areas.

Escusa said the fruit trees were purposely planted to benefit the local community, as well as provide food for monkeys, birds and other wildlife.

The other week, SBMA chairman Feliciano Salonga and administrator Armand Arreza joined a special tree-planting activity on the occasion of the chairman’s birthday.

As requested by Salonga, 1,000 saplings of narra, mango and citrus trees were planted that day on a hillside overlooking Subic’s Triboa Bay. Salonga planted his lone “birthday tree,” a mango of the Sweet Elena variety, while Arreza planted his own green investments—one citrus and two mango trees.