PBSP cites VECO’s support for ‘green’ project

PBSP cites VECO’s support for ‘green’ project
Philippine News Agency
June 6, 2011


CEBU CITY, June 6 – The Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP)-Visayas has recognized the support of the Visayan Electric Co. (VECO) Inc., Metro Cebu’s lone power utility, for its “Save the Buhisan Watershed” project.

VECO has become the single biggest donor of the project, with its P19.4 million donation in 2010 to fund a reforestation park project in the Central Cebu Protected Landscape (CCPL), where the Buhisan dam is situated.

In 2010, VECO and PBSP entered into a memorandum of agreement for the rehabilitation, protection and conservation of the CCPL and Mactan island.

The Buhisan Watershed and Forest Reserve (BWFR) is one of the five protected areas within the 29,062-hectare Central Cebu Protected Landscape.

The Buhisan dam of the Metro Cebu Water District in Barangay Buhisan in the hinterlands of Cebu City supplies water to Cebu communities.

The other four protected areas are Mananga and Kotkot-Lusaran Watershed and Forest Reserves, and Central Cebu and Sudlon National Parks, where VECO employees have been planting seedlings of Cebu’s native trees since 2009, even before the start of the reforestation park project.

The watershed project is Cebu’s response to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to eradicate poverty and the worst forms of human deprivation by 2015.