Making every
species count

PART I

Counting wildlife is as crucial as saving them

Animal species could be vanishing before any data about them is collected.

In 2017, wildlife researcher David Quimpo went on a mission to survey roughly 10,000 hectares of forest in central Philippines. With him were a forester and some villagers living at the foot of the Central Panay Mountain Range, the largest forest area in Western Visayas.

Their goal was to determine whether the rufous-headed hornbill’s population and habitat were growing, shrinking, or stable in the northern part of the 106,000-hectare mountain range.

Locally called dulungan , the rufous-headed hornbill used to inhabit the Philippines’ three central islands and nowhere else. Threatened by habitat loss and hunting, it has fewer than 2,500 left in the wild. It’s known to be already absent on Guimaras Island and living on a knife’s edge on the neighboring Negros Island. Its remaining stronghold is the nearby Panay Island where the mountain range is located.

A mounting list

The fight for survival is not exclusive to dulungan.

Experts estimate at least 1,106 species alive today in the Philippines to be at risk of disappearing in the wild. That’s over half of the country’s 1,994 land and wetland species that scientists have identified at the time of assessment.

Broken down, the imperiled species include 322 vertebrates or animals witha backbone. They belong to the class of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles. There are also 784 imperiled invertebrates, or those without a backbone. They constitute animal groups, such as beetles, insects, snails, and spiders.

The number is based on the Philippine Red List of Threatened Species. This list was released by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in 2019 through Administrative Order (DAO) No. 09. It divides species into four categories, which ascend in alarming order, from “other threatened species” to “vulnerable” to “endangered” to, finally, “critically endangered,” the last step before extinction.

The number of imperiled species grew as the DENR’s assessment expanded in 2019. It leaped to 1,106 in 2019 from 148 in the first assessment in 2004, even as seven left the list.

All groups of animals and threat categories saw a sharp rise in the number of species in danger. The bulk came from the 784 spineless species that were assessed for the first time. The number of species closest to extinction and thus needing immediate attention soared to 60. This tally includes all 24 critically endangered species that retained their status, 14 species that moved up the threat ranking, and 22 new entrants.

Experts cautioned against the overinterpretation of the growing Philippine Red List though. Any update or movement in the list, they pointed out, does not necessarily mean the situation of the animals is better or worse than a decade ago. It could be a result of discoveries, research developments, or the ever-evolving nature of taxonomy, which specialists use to group animals based on similarities.

“Invertebrates were not included before because of a lack of information,” said ecologist Neil Aldrin Mallari. Several disciplines of animal science, aside from invertebrates, are in their infancy and “discovery phase” and thus have “incomplete data of species,” he added.

A provisional, disquieting solution

In cases of uncertainty, Mallari said, animal specialists apply the precautionary principle or the better-safe-than-sorry approach. This approach ensures that the neglected and unfamiliar species don’t quietly slide into oblivion even though little is known about them. For example, the knowledge of hundreds of spineless species and recently discovered animals, like a kind of scarab beetle or a monitor lizard found in Tawi-Tawi in 2010, is so poor that they were assigned the precautionary least-threat status.

Some animals, according to Mallari and Quimpo, were also placed on the list simply because they’re endemic, not because their population or habitat is shrinking. The precautionary principle holds that species thriving in a small area, like an island or a mountainside, gets a threatened status since its disappearance would mean extinction from the world.

Take the small, slightly wooly-furred shrew mouse, which is abundant in the mossy forest of Mt. Isarog in Camarines Sur. Despite the mountain area being protected and relatively less disturbed, the mouse received a least-threat status because it’s genetically distinct.

Not all delisting and downlisting reveal better chances of persisting in the wild either.

The Philippine pygmy fruit bat was removed from the list because facts weren’t enough to support its listing. The Mindanao fanged frog and Basilan caecilian are among a dozen species that dropped to a lower status because little information can support a higher one.

In better news, the Philippine flying lemur and long-tailed macaque came off the list because more research showed they have more stable populations than previously thought

But more information, more often than not, leads to evidence of animals’ dire state.

Wildlife biologist Matt Ward said the knowledge gained from doing plenty of surveys on the Visayan hornbill informed its uplisting from the endangered to critically endangered status.

“The shift in the status in 2019 was not because this was a point at which they were more threatened than before,” clarified Ward. “It’s more that by 2019, we had a lot more data. And we had people who were going out and looking at these species and trying to identify how strong the population was and how stable it was.”

Ward works for the conservation group Talarak Foundation, which tracks the Visayan hornbill in the wild. Like the dulungan, this bird is found only on Visayas islands in central Philippines. He said assessing “the level of threat the birds are under and the (conservation) actions that need to be taken” was no small feat.

A conservation tool

Republic Act No. 9147 or the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act, passed in 2001, requires the environmental agency to create and update regularly or as needed a list of threatened species. Experts like Quimpo supply assessments and data that help determine what makes it on the list.

In carrying out the law, the DENR issued Administrative Order No. 15 in 2004. It contains the country’s first national red list. A decade later, the DENR tapped experts to reassess species and their status. Their findings formed the updated red list established under DAO 2019-09.

“We covered (all species) as much as we could or as much as the data we gathered would allow us to,” said bird expert Carmela Española. She teaches biology at the University of the Philippines - Diliman and helped reassess bird species for the red list.

From 2015 to 2017, Española and her colleagues sifted through all known research on their species of expertise. They weighed any changes since the first review, gauged how close the species were teetering towards disappearing, and decided the status of each one.

Following the law, they sorted species into one of four categories of endangerment. A species is deemed in danger if its habitat is disrupted or on the verge of destruction, the size of its habitat is small, or more animals of the species die than live.

The system means that the higher up the classification ladder, the greater the chance a species will become wiped out in the wild. This also suggests that the need for conservation efforts is stronger with each rung added.

A red list “is a tool used to prioritize areas for conservation,” said Española. As such, the fate of an imperiled animal may well rest on the list.

The Philippine Red List has a legal force under RA 9147. Hunting, collecting, and killing listed wildlife is a crime punishable with fines and jail time depending on the conservation status of the wildlife. The local government or DENR is authorized to demarcate the habitat critical to the survival of listed wildlife. When demarcations are made, restrictions on activities in these areas are set.

Aside from the law, Española said the classification of a species on a red list is often required when accessing conservation funds in international and local networks.

On a global scale, a species must be listed in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List to be eligible for support. The IUCN Red List has been the world’s most authoritative listing of species’ extinction risk since 1964. It has the most widely recognized assessments of plant and animal species.

In the Philippines, funding agencies typically require both the IUCN and Philippine red listings.

Some species like the critically endangered rufous-headed hornbill have the same status on the Philippine and IUCN Red Lists. Others are classified differently between the two lists, said Quimpo, who contributed to the recent assessment. He cited as an example the critically endangered Visayan hornbill. Its IUCN threat status is a notch below its national list status. He clarified that although they considered the IUCN’s evaluation, they also factored in local situations and knowledge in their final decision.

Mallari believed the Philippine Red List failed in this sense. To him, it is but a list of imperiled species designed to determine penalties for violating the law.

A red listing exercise is done to “understand the drivers of extinction,” Mallari said. In this way, “we can identify measures to address these drivers to get (species) off the red list.” That’s why compared to conferring a status, it is more important to show how one species became threatened, he said.

But Mallari admitted that adopting the IUCN standard was challenging because “it’s so data-intensive.” According to him, this is particularly true of specialists assessing, for example, mammals because research on them took off only about three decades ago. “They cannot make those assessments as detailed as we did for the birds.”

How little we know

Knowledge gaps mean the Philippine Red List is incomplete, Quimpo said. It doesn’t entirely capture all that’s out there, experts pointed out.

More than 60 percent of the assessed species are groups that we fairly know: amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles. Only about 40 percent are spineless animals: beetles, butterflies, snails, and spiders, among others. The latter figure represents only a handful of those that live on Philippine soil and is far from the estimated two million known invertebrates on Earth.

In the Philippine Red List, birds compose the majority of species in the worst category because they are more studied than others, explained Española. Hence, there is enough information to apply the assessment criteria to accurately ascertain their endangered position. For species on which there is little information, it’s difficult to draw any conclusions.

Birds are visible and easy to observe while other animals are not, Española and Mallari noted. Many mammals, such as the threatened Philippine deer and tarsier, can only be seen at night. Reptiles like snakes tend to shy away from people. Plenty of teensy amphibians like frogs are challenging to spy on.

Birds also benefit from hobbyists who can help fill the gap in research. In fact, Española said new bird species are discovered every year because of “very keen birdwatchers.”

“It’s easier to pick up birdwatching as a hobby compared to mammal watching or (herping),” said Mallari. Herping is the term used to describe searching out amphibians or reptiles, which are called herps. Herping involves skills like learning species-specific frog calls to track them and knowing handling techniques for venomous snakes.

The scarcity of experts in many invertebrate species also made these largely neglected creatures harder to assess. “Species without experts working on them weren’t assessed at all,” Española revealed. “We know nothing about them,” she said.

Data on the roster of experts from the Biodiversity Management Bureau (BMB) showed that not all groups of animals were represented.

Bird and mammal pundits dominate the list as usual. Of the 26 experts on the list, eight specialize in birds, another eight in mammals, three in amphibians and reptiles, and two in reptiles. There are five for invertebrates: two specialize in insects, and one each in beetles, butterflies, and moths or spiders.

A plethora of other invertebrates like ants, bees, bugs, centipedes, flies, grasshoppers, scorpions, worms, and scores of undiscovered organisms are yet to be assessed.

A peer-reviewed article, titled “State of biodiversity documentation in the Philippines,” supports what Española, Mallari, and Quimpo conceded: certain species and locations are far less explored than others.

Published in the journal PeerJ in 2022, the study looked into biodiversity data and DNA barcodes and checked their spread among ranks of living things and across provinces. The biodiversity data include observations of animal and plant species in their natural environment and information on their population and characteristics. These are similar bits of information that Quimpo’s team gathered in Panay. A DNA barcode IDs a species.

One interesting finding of the study is that southern provinces, such as Basilan, Maguindanao, Northern Samar, and Zamboanga Sibugay, received scant attention in biodiversity research. Their northern counterparts like Aurora, Cavite, and Palawan were overrepresented.

What might explain this, the authors posit, are the accessibility of an area and its proximity to research facilities that are concentrated in Luzon.

The authors observed that areas more frequently surveyed are more reachable by road and free from security concerns. According to them, well-funded foreign researchers, who generated 70 percent of the barcode data, were often advised to avoid traveling in conflict-affected parts of Mindanao for safety.

For local contributions, the authors found that the institutions with copyright to the records collected data only from places near Metro Manila and Central Luzon where they are based.

Loss of wildlife

One species is already an enormous task to do, let alone assess a thousand of them, Quimpo said, buckling under the trammels of conservation research. “You can’t expect organizations to research all species,” he said in Filipino.

The cause for concern, Quimpo said, is that “we may be losing species even before we get a piece of information on them.” On top of that, it may take time for us to know the role they play and the effects of their loss.

No land and wetland species in the Philippines that went extinct in modern times had been recorded on the IUCN Red List. The Philippine Red List doesn’t have an extinct category either. But rather than demonstrate flourishing wildlife, this absence of official extinction records reflects scientists’ somewhat conservative attitude in declaring an animal extinct.

Take the Sulu bleeding-heart, a native pigeon familiar to the earliest settlers of the remote island province of Tawi-Tawi in the southernmost tip of the country. The first and last confirmed sighting of the bird was when it was killed, and specimens were collected in 1891. Experts, who know almost nothing about this rare bird, surmised that it’s most likely extinct. Yet, they conferred it a critically endangered status.

“We still want that possibility of them being found. We’re still hopeful that we’ll see them,” Quimpo said with faint optimism.

The Sulu bleeding-heart has been searched for many years. Although locals have reported seeing the bird, researchers could not confirm and reach a consensus about traces of its population in the wild. Not even its sounds, calls, and breeding habits are known.

Some studies assert that these birds could still survive. They argue that surveys to locate them failed to scour the whole province, which lies in the vicinity of armed conflict and struggles with recurring kidnappings. Despite the unsuccessful attempts to track down the bird, surveys found its supposed natural habitat being heavily logged and destroyed, which threatens its survival.

If by any chance the Sulu bleeding-heart is hanging by a thread but then declared extinct, Española asked rhetorically: “What will happen?”

“You cannot get funds for its conservation.”

Española said an extinct designation could be justified by, for example, the loss of a suitable habitat. When this happens, there’s almost nothing conservationists can do to revive the species’ population.

An example is the extinct Penelopides Ticaoensis. It’s a subspecies of the Visayan hornbill that once thrived in the old-growth forests of Ticao Island in Masbate and nowhere else. This 300-plus-square-kilometer island no longer has such forest left, which means there’s nowhere the species can live.

Animals as lobbyists

When Quimpo’s team surveyed the dulungan in 2017, they started with two towns in Antique, one of four provinces touched by the Central Panay Mountain Range. It took them two years to add two more towns in Aklan, another province on the other side of the mountain range.

“It’s not that easy because it’s not that easy to find funding for these studies,” Quimpo said.

Research is nowhere near over. To protect the dulungan in the long run, conservationists need to constantly monitor its population and habitat requirements such as food, water, space, and shelter. But since conservation funds are far more meager than needed, finding money to support their work is another battle conservationists like Quimpo face. “They’re hard-pressed to look for funds to do their work every year,” said Española.

Ward said one way to protect animals is to preserve the remaining wild spaces sustaining their life. This especially applies to the dulungan, which relies on old-growth trees to breed in. “You cannot replant a 100-year-old tree. You need to do what you can to maintain those habitats and the space.”

The Negros-based organization where Ward works strives to conserve all of Negros Island’s native wildlife, including the dulungan. Aside from researching the animals, the organization breeds some in captivity as assurance against extinction.

While preserving the environment should be a conservation priority, that concept, he said, “is a very hard sell” to the public, funding bodies, and even governments. In his view, people aren’t willing to donate money to champion the conservation of habitat or space but rather gravitate toward charismatic animals.

“It’s much harder for someone to connect to a lump of soil or a tree in the middle of a forest full of trees than it is to connect to a baby deer or a beautiful-looking parrot,” Ward said. Conservation, he said, is “a very competitive market.” Species vie for limited attention and resources. To navigate their way around this, organizations use the flagship and umbrella methods. While they’re not a panacea, they’re attainable solutions for conservation.

The dulungan, featured in Talarak Foundation’s logo, is both a flagship and umbrella species. As a flagship species, conservation groups use this bizarre, beautiful bird to grab people’s attention and drum up support for the environment.

As an umbrella species, the bird’s protection benefits myriad other animals and plants that live in its habitat, the old-growth forests.

“Instead of trying to convince the public, donors, and funding agencies to protect the environment as a whole, what you’re asking them to do is put money to protect these species,” Ward said.

As such, conservation groups called on people to stop logging to protect the dulungan’s nesting sites in old-growth trees and the large fruit trees it feeds on. They trained locals as forest guards and supported them with sustainable livelihood training so they wouldn't take from the forest. They partnered with local governments to declare habitats as conservation areas and adopt forest protection policies as safeguards against shifting political priorities and the unwieldy bureaucracy.

“Conservation work does not end in surveys; it doesn’t end in research,” Quimpo said. “Local communities and governments must be able to put the surveys to practical use.”

Part 2 explores the country’s animal species at risk of extinction and the factors contributing to such risk.

PART II

The clock is ticking for Philippine wildlife

On the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains, three houses with a wood carving mounted on their apex stand amid overgrown grasses. “That’s inspired by the beak of a kalaw,” Ronnie Amatorio said in Filipino, pointing at the top of the roof.

Amatorio, an Ilongot, was using the local name of the rufous hornbill, the largest of the 11 hornbill species found only in the Philippines. The bird symbolizes strength among Ilongots, the indigenous people whose name literally means “from the jungle.”

Only Ilongot elite warriors and headhunters could have their houses designed with the kalaw’s beak. Only they can don headdresses and earrings made with the bird’s bright red casque and reddish-brown plumage.

Not only is the kalaw valued spiritually among Ilongots, but its call, which resonates through the dense jungle, is also used to help track time. In recent years, however, not only has the bird been difficult to see, but its call has become unreliable, too.

Ilongots use other materials now for their accessories and the clock to tell time. But Amatorio said they still – and choose to – rely on animals for food and the forest for shelter. For centuries, they have lived in and protected their 200,000-hectare ancestral land lying northeast of the Sierra Madre. They have become increasingly concerned about what they observe to be declining wildlife and forests.

The Sierra Madre, the country’s longest mountain range, supports a huge range of species. More than a dozen animal species inhabiting its mountains, including the rufous hornbill, are listed on the Philippine Red List of Threatened Species.

Island life in peril

The Philippine Red List is the most exhaustive look yet at the situation of the animals with whom we share the country’s 7,000-plus islands. Although it offers a crude estimate, it’s the only view we have of our animals’ status, according to ecologist and conservation advocate Neil Aldrin Mallari.

“The more important element (in the list) would be endemic species,” said Mallari, president of the nonprofit Center for Conservation Innovation. Mallari was referring to species distinctive to the Philippines and found nowhere else in the world.

Endemic species abound in “the Philippines due to it being an archipelago,” said David Quimpo of the conservation organization Haribon Foundation. These species have evolved independently – barely traveled and interacted – on the country’s scattered islands over millions of years. Some are found across many parts of the country, while others are rarer and confined only to a single or a few islands.

Conservationists consider these species the most threatened due to their distinctiveness, smaller populations, and limited habitat. They believe that the “uniqueness of Philippine biodiversity,” the sum of all life in this country, entails the responsibility to conserve it rests entirely on the nation.

Data from the Biodiversity Management Bureau (BMB) shows that half of the Philippine vertebrate fauna are unique to the country. Reptiles have the highest degree of endemism among groups of vertebrates, with four in five species surviving in small, restricted areas.

Based on the Philippine Red List, endemic species account for three in four vertebrate species that may vanish in the wild.

Mammals are probably the most at risk, with only two of the 57 assessed species safe from extinction. Most are endemic, such as the tamaraw and the Visayan spotted deer.

The tamaraw is the world’s smallest buffalo found only on the island of Mindoro. The hunting and killing of this animal have been outlawed since 1936, but its population has continued to decline. Its wild population is estimated at only less than 500 animals roaming the protected Mount Iglit-Baco National Park.

The Visayan spotted deer originates in Visayas islands in central Philippines. This species has only about 700 animals living in fragments of forests on a few islands

The Philippines is not short of native birds on the verge of vanishing. Birds make up half of the threatened endemic species. A fifth of these imperiled endemic birds face imminent extinction threat.

An iconic case is the Philippine eagle, the country’s national bird. Its steadily declining population, which was estimated in 2016 at fewer than 500, has seen scientists plead for protective measures for the past half a century.

One in four known amphibian species is in trouble, too. All threatened amphibians, from frogs to toads to caecilians – which look like a cross between a worm and a snake, are endemic. The bulk are varieties of frogs that, to the untrained eyes, may resemble each other but are distinctly different.

The Gigantes limestone frog has the most dire of status. Its home – the 2,100-hectare limestone karst forests and caves of Gigantes Islands off the coast of Panay in the Visayas – has been deteriorating.

Reptiles like snakes and lizards seemed relatively safe, with only one in 10 considered imperiled. Like others, many threatened reptiles are endemic. One is the Philippine crocodile, which used to be so common throughout the country but now only exists in a few areas.

Space for wildlife

This map shows where any of the at-risk vertebrate species were known to occur in forests and grasslands of the country’s 81 provinces. Many of them live outside of areas protected and managed for biodiversity.

Every red dot on the map indicates a record of a species observed in its natural habitat. The records of 310 species were culled from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a global, government-funded network that crowdsources data from museums, universities, and citizen scientists.

Three-fifths of the 83 imperiled species found in Davao del Sur are native to the huge southern island of Mindanao.

Unique species of mynas, sunbirds, parrotfinches, and horned frogs were spotted in Davao del Sur’s wilds. These animals lost about 18,500 hectares of their habitat in the past two decades, data from Global Forest Watch (GFW) reveal.

Palawan is often called the country’s last frontier because of its pristine beaches and forests and biologically diverse waters. Its forests house 79 imperiled species, including the Calamian deer and Palawan pangolin, peacock-pheasant, and bearded pig that are unique to the island province.

In Palawan, which accounts for the country’s largest forest area, destruction is mounting. Its tree loss increased sharply from an average of 8,000 hectares a year in the past two decades to 32,000 hectares in 2022, its highest on record.

Negros Oriental harbors species of hornbill, pigeon, kingfisher, deer, and warty pig that are in peril. One of two provinces that comprise Negros Island, it hosts the largest number of vertebrate animals facing the worst threat. These species are found only in forests in the central Philippines and have lost much of their natural environment.

In 2000, Negros Oriental was already barely forested. Only 39 percent of its land area was covered with trees. In 2022, the province further lost roughly 8,600 hectares of tree cover.

Collapsing canopy

“For the animals that are found in terrestrial ecosystems, the main threat (to their lives) would be habitat destruction,” said Carmela Española, a biology professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Countless animals live in and depend on forests, which covered 90 percent of the country centuries ago. But humans have cleared forests to plant crops, build roads and highways, and expand cities.

In the last two decades alone, the country lost 1.42 million hectares of tree cover, according to GFW data. About 13 percent of it are old-growth forests called “primary forests” occupied by a multitude of native animals and plants.

Mallari cited a seminal study in the 1980s that estimated the tipping point of a forest at 45 percent. This means that when an area loses more than half of its forest, the remaining forest won’t be able to support the diverse life that calls it home.

As early as 2000, 17 of the country’s 81 provinces had tree cover that was less than half of its area. Metro Manila, the country’s capital and main hub, had the lowest share of tree cover at just 5 percent of its area.

Tree loss did not slow down.

Across the country, nine in 10 provinces had lower tree cover in 2020 than they did in 2000 even if their gains are taken into account. Only a handful gained more tree cover than they lost in that period. Tawi-Tawi, the 109,000-hectare chain of islands inhabited by unique species of pigeon, pygmy woodpecker, and brown dove, saw the highest net loss.

In the past 22 years, an average of 65,000 hectares of trees, more than the size of Metro Manila, have been cut down every year. Lush forests in Palawan and Agusan del Sur suffered the greatest loss. A significant increase over the years was also observed in Occidental Mindoro, Davao del Norte, and Lanao del Norte.

The largest tree loss occurred in 2016 and 2017; at least 110,000 hectares, almost twice the annual average, were destroyed in a year. After 2017, the pace of loss slowed for four years until 2021, but it started to rise again a year later. In 2022, Southern Leyte, Dinagat Islands, and Bohol delivered the most striking numbers. Tree loss in these provinces went up over 1,000 percent, levels never seen in past years.

Española said there should be a stronger commitment from the government to protect habitats. As of 2022, 4.8 hectares of terrestrial ecosystem, or 16 percent of the country, are protected as natural and national parks, protected landscapes, wildlife sanctuaries, and watershed forest reserves. The protection of these ecosystems is established under the National Integrated Protected Areas System (NIPAS) Act, Expanded NIPAS Act, and other national laws..

“They shouldn't allow industries and businesses to rule over these areas, or habitat, or ecosystem,” Española argued. “It’s a question of whether (or not) we go with conservation, which will entail that some areas will not be accessible for any business endeavors like logging,” she added.

Speaking at a forum, natural resources management expert Rex Victor Cruz of UP Los Baños painted a bleak landscape of how the country uses and manages its land. He said the general trend is that croplands and structures are present and increasing in protected areas. “They’re not supposed to be there, but they’re there. And that actually tells us that we’re not really effective in making sure that those areas are not supposed to be used for certain purposes.”

Cruz said further encroachments into forestlands could happen in the future in provinces with limited “alienable and disposable lands” or those declared not for forest purposes.

“We will have an issue of balancing the needs of a growing population and the limited land that is disposed of for economic use or production purposes,” Cruz said.

Not one reason

Aside from losing their place to live, wildlife biologist Matt Ward said that hornbills on Negros Island also contend with climate change, poaching, and hunting.

Ward is the executive director of the Talarak Foundation that advocates on behalf of the Visayan and rufous-headed hornbills that are found on Negros Island. Animals on this island are victims of the once-verdant forests that gave way to sugar plantations. With reforestation efforts, the island now has belts of regenerated forests nestled alongside the remaining little old forests.

“As much as we want to restore and reforest and put things back, we are still struggling to maintain what we have,” said Ward. Strong typhoons, he said, could “completely destroy” young forests, which, in turn, could decimate threatened animals like hornbills. “More and more we are seeing super typhoons here,” he said, attributing this new typhoon category, created in 2015, to climate change. “One of the values of having those older forests, those natural primary forests, is protection against things like storms.” Birds find shelter from tree trunks hardy enough to overcome disasters.

Like Ward, Mallari believes that typhoons have become more intense due to climate change just as scientists predicted. And this affects the ability of a forest ecosystem to cope with them. “Deforestation may cause biodiversity loss while climate change accelerates it,” he inferred from researching biodiversity.

As an example, Mallari recalled witnessing hundreds of fallen trees and heaps of carcasses in Palawan in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Odette in December 2021. He thought Palawan could withstand it since its forest cover hadn’t transgressed the 45 percent tipping point. But with what happened in some parts of the province, he deemed the threshold might not be applicable anymore.

Meanwhile, hunting and poaching are the greatest threat to wild, larger animals like the tamaraw, deer, and wild boar, said Española. Large animals are easy targets for hunters and poachers who “would usually capture (them) and then sell or consume them or keep them as a pet.” These animals are typically sought for their flesh, shells, and heads.

Threatened species turned up in two out of five enforcement operations against wildlife trafficking conducted by BMB from 2010 to 2019. BMB seized 7,277 animals of threatened species during this period. More than 5,000 animals are critically endangered, including hawksbill and forest turtles, blue-naped parrots, crocodiles, and tamaraws.

The lush life

In Española’s view, scientists don’t know exactly how much damage the loss of wildlife will have on Philippine society. That’s “contingent on our knowledge about species’ ecological role,” she said. “But we know very little about these ecological roles because they haven’t been studied,” she admitted.

Hornbill is among the “species with obvious ecological roles.” Its role in dispersing seeds earned it the title “farmer of the forests.” Hornbills travel long distances to search for fruits and deposit the seeds in young and old forests along the way, helping the forest regenerate while depending on it.

Mallari said hornbills are “a great indicator of the quality and extent of the ecosystem” while the diversity of the ecosystem helps us “understand the state of the environment.”

Mallari linked the preservation of the rufous hornbill in Sierra Madre Mountains to the fate of the forests in northern Philippines where this species lives. “If this species dies out, then there’s no chance for forests in Luzon to regenerate on their own,” he said. “As we see dwindling populations of the hornbill, then you’re seeing the sorry state of forest ecosystems in the Philippines,” he added.

Mallari warned against the collapse of the country’s biodiversity. He believes that threatening to wipe out animals and destroying living systems endangers at the same time our own food supplies, health, and security.

“Biodiversity is your building blocks of ecosystems, and ecosystems provide the ecosystem services for us to survive as human species,” said Mallari.

“As you take out one mammal or bird or reptile or plant from nature, the base (of your ecosystem) becomes wobbly, unstable. And we will not be okay; it is not okay,” he added.