We need a green new leadership now. The year 2020 is pivotal for planetary action everywhere. Nations are scrambling to institute economic stimulus programs that can make or break our urgent need for a just and green recovery.  

World leaders are also being challenged to ramp up ambition for commitments to climate mitigation and adaptation and biodiversity protection in crucial UN conferences and summits at this eleventh hour of humanity.

The Filipino people and our common home are dying from contagion and catastrophe. We must break away from the current dispensation that intends to go back to the pre-pandemic normal of business-as-usual. 

We, the undersigned, thus call for a green new leadership that will undertake the following:

1. Institute a moratorium on mining, dredging, reclamation, plantations, infrastructure, incinerators, fossil fuel power plants, and other extractive and destructive projects being touted as COVID-19 response and economic recovery strategies;

2. Undertake a just and green recovery plan that will subsidize universally accessible public health and social amelioration, and transition towards a low-carbon, nature-based, and needs-based economy;

3. Recognize, protect, and support environmental defenders by enacting a policy on the rights of nature and its defenders that will consequently repeal authoritarian laws such as the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020;

4.Double the national budget for biodiversity and environmental conservation towards the protection of 30% of the country’s natural spaces and tripling the number forest rangers, sea wardens, and other environmental workers;

5.Accelerate the transition to a new, just clean energy economy by supporting community-led energy solutions by increasing fiscal incentives for renewable energy development; 

6.Invest in scaling up community-level zero waste management models and in clean treatment, storage, and disposal facilities for healthcare waste such as microwave and autoclave technologies;

7. Subsidize climate-resilient sustainable agriculture, fisheries, and non timber forest production with an emphasis on healthy food through cooperativized land cultivation and fisheries management areas;

8. Expand environmental and climate education and media towards inculcating a culture of care for nature and active citizenship to resolve the planetary crisis;

9. Push for a people’s green new deal that will facilitate just compensation from top polluter countries and carbon major companies for the past, present, and future8. ecological and climate injustices suffered by the Filipino people and its environment;

10. Fast track priority policy reforms founded on a ‘Health in All Policies’ framework and on the Philippine Greenprint—the National Land Use Act, the Sustainable Forest Management Act, the Philippine Mineral Resources Bill, and the Indigenous Communities Conserved Territories and Areas Bill.