MANAGING FOR SOCIETY

THE massive damage wrought by Typhoon Pablo (international codename: Bopha) has again brought to the fore the high vulnerability of the Philippines to the vagaries of climate change

and environmental degradation. This highlights the challenge of international and national efforts aimed at disaster risk reduction and mitigation: the challenge of climate change adaptation and disaster risk management at the local level.  Despite the availability of geohazard maps for adaptive land-use planning at the local level, most local government managers failed to protect their key publics from the disastrous effects in known flood-plains and landslide-prone areas. Despite the advanced notice of weather forecasters of the expected occurrence of a perfect storm, the lack of preparedness of the required local management response for rescue and relief operations exacerbates the lack of planning to mitigate the effects of natural disaster risks. Such ineptitude and gross mismanagement should now be considered criminal.

Philippine environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act of 1999 (Republic Act 8749), the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 (Act 9003), and the Clean Water Act of 2004 (Act 9275) have been, as most have lamented, “honored in the breach rather than in the observance.”  The traditional government approach to enforcement of environmental regulations is to impose civil sanctions or seek injunctive relief.

Environmental statutes belong to the class of laws created to protect the public welfare where the standard of criminal environment liability is less stringent, reflecting the general concern to protect the important public interest in environment safety.  These are to be liberally read to impose criminal liability without any requirement of intent.

The US Congress legislated as early as 1899 its first environmental law, the River and Harbors Act, which made it a federal misdemeanor to discharge any refuse matter, other than that which flows naturally from sewers, into any body of navigable water of the United States.  It was only in the late 1970s, however, that American society began to see environmental violators as public health threats and demanded strict criminal environmental sanctions on the offenders.

By then, the US Government realized the need for criminal enforcement action to ensure compliance with environmental statutes.  Applying existing US laws, it charged violators with the crime of “reckless endangerment,” when a person “recklessly engages in conduct that exhibits a culpable disregard of foreseeable consequences to others from the act or omission involved, or which creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person.”

In 1984, the US Congress enacted the first felony-level criminal sanction in an environmental statute.  Amending the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, it introduced the crime of “knowing endangerment” that punishes “any person who knowingly violates provisions of the Act and who knows at that time that he thereby places another person in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury.” By 1990, it introduced amendments to the Clean Air Act to expand the statutory meaning of the term “any person” to include not only natural and juridical persons, but also political subdivisions and government entities, and the officers, employees and agents of these entities. 

In line with the “responsible [corporate] officer” theory, local government managers should be held criminally responsible for wrongdoings affecting public health and welfare if the officers were in a position to seek out, discover and stop the illegal act but failed to do so.  

Perry A. Villanueva is connected with the Department of Agrarian Reform and is a DBA student at the De La Salle University.  The views expressed above are the author’s and do not reflect the official position of the DLSU, its faculty and administrators.