BAGUIO CITY– An international non-government organization recognized on Monday the city’s efforts to give residents and tourists clean air, noting Baguio’s air quality remains to be “fair.”
“Based on monitoring data of the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) in Burnham Park, the current level is compliant with the national ambient air standards,” said Precious Benjamin, environmental researcher of Clean Air Asia.
Clean Air Asia, established in 2001, is the premier air quality network for Asia by the Asian Development Bank, World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development.
Benjamin said the group’s goal is to highlight the actions being done by the city to keep the air quality within the acceptable standard.
“We recognized Baguio for completing the city’s clean air initiatives that started in 2016 which aims to provide recognition to cities who are taking action for good air quality.
We want to highlight more the actions. It is important that local governments reach a good air quality level but we also want to see how the cities are doing it, their programs and actions to reach their goal,” Benjamin said.
“It is tricky because we cannot see the air that is why we are advocating for a science-based approach to address that and also engaging different stakeholders. The issue of air quality is not only lodged with the environment agency. We also engage transport, planning, health and others because they have different roles in improving air quality,” she added.
Clean Air Asia, she said, also partnered with Sta.Rosa in Laguna, Iloilo and Marikina to improve each local government units’ air quality management capacity.
Benjamin said one measure may not be applicable to a city and it may be possible that such applies to others, so there is the need to have air quality monitoring data that will be used in having an informed decision.
“It is difficult to compare the air quality level of cities because they have different conditions. For example, Baguio is cool and surrounded by mountains that is why the dispersion of pollutants is different from that of Metro Manila which is warm and open,” she said.
From 2016 to 2018 Clean Air Asia and the city government, through the City Environment and Parks Management (CEPMO), have collaborated to come up with initiatives to maintain a good quality air in Baguio under the Cities Clean Air Partnership Program (CCAPP) and the City to City Cooperation (C3).
“The city registration is very important to enhance and communicate our local initiatives and clean air campaign. It is also one vital avenue of sharing of results and lessons learned and for continuing cooperation and partnership,” said Ruben Cervantes, CEPMO Officer-in-charge.
Cervantes said Burnham Park showed a “good” to “fair” air quality level compared to readings from the roadside monitoring at lower Session road–which is one of the issues that the local government wants to address.
Data obtained from CEPMO show that out of the 23 sampling locations, the air quality remains to be “fair” in the city.
Cervantes said among the efforts of the city to make the air clean are the continuous greening and tree planting programs of different sectors.
Baguio also recently implemented the ordinance requiring that couples first plant a tree before they are issued a marriage license.
The city government has purchased its own roadside testing machine to allow it have a daily roadside vehicle emission testing, subjecting vehicles at random.
Data show that in 2016, a total of 8,373 vehicles were flagged down for testing. Of the number, a total of 3,872 (46 percent) passed while 4,501 (54 percent) failed.
In 2017, out of the 7,713 tested on roadsides, 60 percent passed while 40 percent failed.
The 2018 record shows better results with 68 percent passing and 32 percent failing of the total 8,827 vehicles tested.
“The operators and owners are now aware of our continuing effort to clean our air and they did their share to maintain their vehicles in order to comply with the clean air ordinance,” Cervantes said.** PNA
