Press Release
April 26, 2010

GOVT URGED TO SPONSOR CONSTRUCTING 'GREEN BUILDINGS'

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Q. Pimentel, Jr. today urged the government to promote and sponsor the construction of "green" public buildings to help the nation overcome the discomfort and harm that global warming brings to human life.

Pimentel said Filipino architects must be encouraged to erect edifices with "green architectural designs" that will safely capture, absorb and reduce carbon dioxide emissions that pollute the atmosphere."

"In the face of global warming, it is essential that we add another dimension to the structures that you create," the veteran senator told the 36th national convention of the United Architects of the Philippines at the SMX Convention Center, Mall of Asia in Pasay City.

"You must introduce the element of greening the buildings that you construct; the landscape that you envision and the space in which you exercise your profession to help diminish, if not eliminate, the threat of global warming that can wipe out life itself."

He called on the government to engage the services of Filipino architects to build green public buildings and provide them with incentives to do so - like tax rebates and even bonuses wherever possible.

Pimentel said life is a cycle of mutual support of human beings for their fellow humans if it is to mean anything.

"And if it is to be sustained, human beings must be aware that the things that surround them, their environment or Mother Earth, nurture life and have lives of their own that must likewise be taken care of in return," he said.

He said he mentioned these circumstances because the earth's inhabitants live in an increasingly abused world.

"We bomb it with nuclear weapons. We overfish the oceans. We overuse water. We poison the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and all kinds of pollution. We cause droughts and floods. We do a thousand and one things that can only shorten, not lengthen, life on earth," the senator from Mindanao said.

Among the professions of the world, he said the architects can do much to alleviate the sad state of affairs that the world is being subjected today.

Pimentel challenged the Filipino architects to prove that in the construction of structures that will serve the best interests of mankind in terms of durability, beauty, utility and effectivity in fighting off the threat of global warming in this part of the world, they are second to none.

News Latest News Feed