MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine government wants private companies to bankroll forest restoration, and it is building the administrative machinery to make those investments stick. At a forum organized by the CarbonPH Coalition in Manila, Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) officials laid out plans for a national carbon registry, combined with satellite tracking, to turn replanted hillsides into verified credits that can trade across Southeast Asia. There is a flaw in Philippine conservation policy that has, for example been prove to be the cause of flooding due to uncontrolled run off in the hinterlands. For decades, government reforestation efforts ran on short funding cycles tied to both political whims and cycles. Programs like the National Greening Program planted millions of saplings with tax pesos, but once the gov’t funded maintenance contracts ran out after three years, nobody watched the trees. Many died, and many others were cut down to produce charcoal. Ray Thomas Kabigting, assistant director of the DENR Forest Management Bureau, told the room of corporate executives and carbon traders that the PH government is changing its policy to attract private capital that will stay put. He also said that the is ready to talk to the business sector about balance sheets, debt, and long-term project finance. Regulators, he added, need to write rules that work for investors rather than sticking strictly to textbook forestry science. The planned registry will log forest baselines, map available public lands, track issued credits, and prevent double counting. The agency has also turned on its National Forest Monitoring System, using satellite data alongside ground surveys to check whether protected canopies actually survive. Aboitiz Equity Ventures, a key backer of the coalition, hosted the session as part of its push to tap regional carbon demand. But with global offset markets battered by scandals over inflated numbers and ignored land rights, corporate backers in Manila spent much of the day talking about project integrity. Ginggay Hontiveros-Malvar, chief reputation and sustainability officer at Aboitiz Equity Ventures, warned that projects will fail internationally if developers try to cut corners. Carbon markets have to show real, verifiable climate benefits, she said, and local communities doing the planting must see actual income from the trade. Under Philippine law, carbon developers cannot just walk onto public land. Projects in upland watersheds routinely intersect with ancestral domains, requiring explicit consent from indigenous tribes under the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act before any commercial contracts are signed. The Philippines is also trying to find its place in the regional market. The country currently sits as an observer in the ASEAN Common Carbon Framework, an initiative uniting carbon market associations and bourses in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. The group wants common trading rules, mutual recognition of credits, and shared digital pipes to link Southeast Asian supplies to global buyers under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Oi-Yee Choo, chief executive of Singapore-based exchange Climate Impact X, said regional coordination gives private operators a unified voice when governments sit down to align trade rules. Anshari Rahman, strategy director at Singaporean investment platform GenZero, argued that Southeast Asia should not try to sell the cheapest credits on the market. By pairing carbon removal with measurable social benefits for rural villages, Rahman said regional projects can sell at a premium to buyers looking for defensible ESG claims. The Philippines holds an edge on operational field costs and homegrown forestry expertise, according to Masayuki Kurihara, a senior officer at Japanese satellite analytics company Archeda Inc. But the country still lags behind its neighbors in setting up the digital platforms needed to feed automated satellite checks directly to international buyers. The test of whether this works in the field is starting in Cebu. Aboitiz Foundation has committed to a 40-year project under the CarbonPH banner to rehabilitate 71,000 hectares of degraded watershed. The project relies on community nurseries, drone surveys, and satellite tracking, serving as an early commercial test for the forestry bureau’s incoming rules. If the DENR can verify its tree counts and plug into regional clearinghouses, the government will finally have a practical way to pull corporate money into long-term watershed protection. If the bureaucracy stalls, the country risks watching regional capital flow into better-regulated forests across Indonesia and Malaysia instead.
