By Nickky de Guzman
WE REGRET to inform you that you have not been selected for the position you are applying for, because you are fat. Or that is what your prospective employer must be thinking, after noticing a bulge form on your stomach when you sat on the chair in front of his desk for your interview.
By Carmencita A. Carilla
DAVAO CITY — The last remaining habitable torogan, a traditional Maranao abode for the village royal family, was declared in 1998 as a National Cultural Treasure.
By Juan EY Arcellana
MANY years ago a student dropped out of professor Gemino Abad’s poetry class at the University of the Philippines because he was in the midst of chasing a girl who later in the summer would drown in the sea off Vigan.
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
THERE will be 10 regular holidays and nine special non-working days in 2016, the Palace recently announced. Are you planning a Holy Week sojourn in Siquijor? Or would you rather stay in bed, read, and do a TV series marathon instead, because, alas, you’ve had enough of a travel “ adventure” already — that is, the everyday traffic and exhausting LRT/MRT commute?
The Binge
By Jessica Zafra
THE REVOLUTION is being televised, in the form of a cyber-thriller on the previously unheralded USA Network. Written and produced by Sam Esmail, Mr. Robot is so plugged into the zeitgeist that you could watch it instead of the nightly news.
By Tony M. Maghirang
FILIPINO BANDS Bleu Rascals and Brat Pack have got the blues — and a globally competitive strain at that.
By Jasmine Agnes T. Cruz
Theater
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Presented by Repertory Philippines’
Medicine Cabinet
By Reiner W. Gloor
THE number of Filipinos dying due to liver cancer may double in the coming years from the present average figure of 20 deaths per day, according to health research statistics.
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA — The rate at which the world is losing its forests has halved, but an area of woodland the size of South Africa has still been lost since 1990, a United Nations (UN) report revealed on Monday.
Improvement has been seen around the globe, even in the key tropical rainforests of South America and Africa, according to a surprisingly upbeat Forest Resources Assessment (FRA), which is released every five years.
Despite the good news, it points out that since 1990, the world had lost forests covering some 129 million hectares — an area the size of South Africa.
“Even though, globally, the extent of the world’s forest continues to decline… the rate of net forest loss has been cut by over 50%,” said the report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The assessment was released at the World Forestry Congress in the South African port city of Durban, host to the 14th edition of the conference.
“FRA 2015 shows a very encouraging tendency towards a reduction in the rates of deforestation and carbon emissions from forests and increases in capacity for sustainable forest management,” said FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva.
“The direction of change is positive, with many impressive examples of progress in all regions of the world.”
WWF International director for forests, Rod Taylor, said the report presented “good news at one level, but the question is how sustainable that is.”
“Even with the reduced rate we still have unacceptable levels of forest loss,” Taylor told AFP.
WWF said that without “bold and urgent action” up to 170 million hectares — the size of Germany, France, Spain and Portugal combined — could be wiped out in the next 20 years.
Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo told the congress that “little progress has been made in fulfilling pledges to… completely eliminate deforestation.”
PLANTED FORESTS INCREASE
Apart from offering oxygen, fuel and building material, trees store important quantities of carbon, which, if released, contribute to global warming.
Halting deforestation is a key focus of UN negotiations for a global pact to limit disastrous climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
The UN talks are designed to secure a deal to be signed by world leaders in Paris in December.
In 1990 the world had 4,128 million hectares of forest covering 31.6% of the global land area, the forest report said.
By 2015 this had decreased to 3,999 million hectares, covering 30.6% — a net loss of some 129 million hectares.
The net annual rate of loss — which takes into account the planting of new forests — has slowed from -0.18% in the 1990s to -0.08% over the last five years.
Planted forest area has increased by more than 110 million hectares since 1990 and now accounts for seven percent of the world’s forest area.
The biggest loss of forests occurred in the tropics, particularly in South America and Africa, although even there the rate of loss “has decreased substantially in the past five years,” the report said.
Natural forest will probably continue to decline, but “due to growing demand for forest products and environmental services, the area of planted forests is likely to continue to increase in coming years.”
The conclusions raised questions of whether alarm bells sounded over forest loss have been overplayed, but the report’s team leader, Kenneth MacDicken, said the FRA had led a change in attitude over deforestation.
“The FRA has since 1948 reported forest area change — including the loss of forest area in the tropics.
“Actions in response to this information have helped slow the rate of forest loss — and in some countries have resulted in increased forest area,” MacDicken told AFP from his base in Rome.
Better information from new forest inventories had also “greatly improved our understanding of forest change”, he said. — AFP
