One of the little known facts about the Marcos era was that the plunder of our people’s wealth included the massive exploitation of our forest resources, resulting in widescale forest denudation, and we may not realize it, the frequent floods we are suffering from today.
This study shows that from 10.6 million hectares just before the declaration of Martial Law, our country’s forest cover shrank to 6.4 million hectares just after the 1986 People Power Revolution.
Succeeding administrations made efforts to reverse the trend. The country’s forest cover is 7 million hectares today — still far smaller than it had before the Marcos era.
(Philippine rainforest photo from Wikipedia, study by Karol Ilagan, pulitzercenter.org)