ISLAND GARDEN CITY OF SAMAL, Davao del Norte (MindaNews / 10 November) – “Nindot kaayo (so amazing),’’ an awestruck private grade school teacher said as he popped out of the water after snorkeling with his students in the shallow waters of Pakiputan Strait between Samal Island and Davao City.
It comes as no surprise. Samal Island along the Davao Gulf in southern Philippines is famous for its pristine beaches and snorkeling and diving sites, and is one of the country’s top tourist destinations.
The island is primed for a tourism boom: an almost four-kilometer bridge linking it with Davao City is now under construction. Once completed in 2028, it will cut travel time between the city and the island to just five minutes from the 20-minute ferry boat ride and the long wait, sometimes hours, especially on weekends, before the cars could board.
Imagine the benefits from a 3.98 kilometer long, 24-meter wide bridge every day?
“This means faster travel time, less traffic gridlock and improved productivity affecting around 25,000 vehicles traversing these areas on a daily basis,” Public Works and Highways Secretary Manuel Bonoan said at the launching of the project at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pasay City on July 6, 2022.
The future benefits, however, come with a great cost to taxpayers and the environment.
The project will add to the government’s growing foreign debt portfolio, as the terms of the multibillion-peso, China-funded infrastructure project show.
Davao-based marine biologist John Michael Lacson lamented the lack of transparency about the project’s environmental impact, on the extent of damage to coral reefs that are rich spawning grounds for many species, and the threat to the fish catch and incomes of fisherfolk in the area.
The Samal Island-Davao City (SIDC) Connector Project was among the 100 big-ticket flagship projects under the “Build, Build, Build’’ infrastructure program of then President Rodrigo Duterte, who cozied up to China in exchange for a raft of investment pledges during his 2016-2022 term.
The project includes a land viaduct, Davao’s ramp and Samal’s roundabout junction.
The P23.04 billion bridge project was awarded to China Road and Bridge Corp. (CRBC) in Duterte’s last year in office. The loan agreement between the Philippines and China, at P19.32 billion covering 90 percent of the project cost, was signed on May 31, 2022, a month before Duterte stepped down from office. The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is implementing the massive bridge project.
Apart from CRBC, two other Chinese firms – Hunan Road and Bridge Construction Group Co., Ltd. (HRBCGC) and China State Construction Engineering Corp. Ltd. (CSCEC) – submitted bids but they were disqualified due to technical deficiencies.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Vice President Sara Duterte and Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian graced the groundbreaking rites for the project on October 27, 2022, on the fourth month of the new administration.
The project’s target date for completion was originally set for October 2027 but has been moved to September 2028. Construction work went full blast only in May 2024 due to delays over road right-of-way issues.
Impact on Paradise Reef
Environmentalists assailed the July 2020 Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report of the DPWH claiming it lacked transparency and did not thoroughly study the environmental impact of the project, using factual and science-based methods, on the marine ecosystem in the chosen alignment in Samal. The EIA stated that coral loss in the impact site would be minimal “because of low hard coral cover,” contrary to a study conducted by a team of marine biologists.
Paradise Reef is a compact coral reef measuring an estimated 1.5 hectares – or at least a third of the Davao City People’s Park – and hosting numerous species of marine life. It is visible during low tide from the beach resort.
Chinese contractor CRBC is building bridge landing points on both sides of the Davao Gulf. On the side of Samal Island, it encroaches on the contiguous corals of Paradise Reef, which lies a few meters away from the shores of Paradise Island Park & Beach Resort and Costa Marina Beach Resort, both owned by the Rodriguez-Lucas family.
The bridge’s landing point in Samal is sandwiched between Paradise Beach and Costa Marina.
The Rodriguez-Lucas family has a foreshore lease on that part of the resort from the shore to the restaurant, but the accommodation and other facilities towards the highway are titled in the name of the family.
The EIA report did not discuss the impact of the offshore construction on the coral reef system but only on the impact on the “seagrass, disruption of fish habitats, and disturbance of natural sedimentary habitats on Samal Island.”
On June 4 this year, barely a month since construction went full swing, environmentalists reported the destruction of at least 63 square meters of hard corals.
The destroyed area, the size of a public school classroom (63 square meters), hosted “centennial” table corals, Carmela Marie Santos, an official of the Sustainable Davao Movement, said after a group dive to monitor the impact on the reef.
“What we have feared two years ago is now happening,” she said during the Kapehan sa Dabaw on June 3 this year, adding the bridge poses clear danger to Paradise Reef because of the way it is aligned.
What is more alarming is that from 63 square meters as of June 4, the extent of damage has multiplied ten times as of November 7, marine biologist Lacson said.
Lacson went underwater to check on the impact of the construction on the corals last Thursday, November 7 and estimated that 600 square meters of corals in Paradise Reef – the size of about 10 classrooms or a junior Olympics swimming pool – are now dead and reduced to rubble.
Lacson said the Paradise Reef ecosystem is “vital to the survival of coral reef communities fringing Samal Island.”
“Paradise Reef is a spawning site – kind of like a bank that keeps hundreds of different kinds of precious coins that were collected throughout history. Spawning is when the bank multiplies those coins and dispenses them into the ocean. The future of coral reefs on the western side of Samal Island depends on this bank,” he said.
“The true environmental impact of the bridge at its current alignment was not realistically reported by the designers to the respective government agencies during the process of securing the Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC),’’ marine biologist Lacson said in an e-mailed response to MindaNews.
Paradise Reef would be decimated in the course of the construction work, predicted Lacson, who holds a doctorate degree in marine biology from the University of Texas.
“Even now, the beginning stages of craneway construction … have (already) destroyed precious living corals,’’ he said. He warned that the reef could not survive the massive siltation from years of construction.
The bridge construction has also forced fishermen to sail farther out to sea, away from the Paradise Reef, their fishing ground. Some of them have been told by CRBC security personnel that the construction area was off-limits to fishing for safety reasons.
“It’s hard to earn from fishing here nowadays,’’ fisherman Armando Paghubasan said in the local language, after docking his banca (small wooden boat with outriggers) loaded with only two kilograms of small fish. “We have to go deeper into the sea.”
The peripheries of Paradise Reef serve as a rich fishing ground for at least 100 small fisherfolk in the area.
Paghubasan said they were warned by construction company guards not to pass by or go near the construction site for their safety, as they might get hit by falling debris.
DPWH Engr. Joweto Tulaylay, SIDC project manager, said they are strictly implementing safety precautions not only for the construction workers but also to the fishermen and tourists visiting Samal Island.
“Sometimes they go very near the working area and we are lifting heavy steel. I hope they will understand,” he said in a text message.
Beneath the ship are fish aggregating devices (FADs), which local fishermen call “bubo,” an enclosure made of plastic screen to trap fish and submerged underwater by either stones or heavy metal.
“The local fishermen who own those FADs underneath could not bring them to the surface because the vessel is obstructing them,” he lamented.
Paghubasan said some 40 kilos could be harvested from 10bubo units sunken for one week in the vicinity of Paradise Reef.
Paradise Reef, he stressed, plays a vital role in the marine ecosystem and the livelihood of small fisherfolk in the area.
“Once the coral reef is gone, the fishes will also be gone because they won’t have a habitat for shelter and spawning,” he added.
Loan terms and interest
According to the 2022 Consolidated Audit Report on ODA-funded Programs and Projects from the Commission on Audit (COA), the cumulative net loan commitment from the state-owned Export-Import Bank of China for the Samal-Davao bridge project is US$ 337.95 million (P18.86 billion, January 3, 2023 Bangko Sentral exchange rate), with a nominal interest rate of two percent per annum, payable in 20 years with a seven-year grace period.
In 20 years or by 2042, the amount will grow to $425.82 million (P25 billion, based on November 6, 2024 exchange rate), including an interest of about $88 million (P5.18 billion).
Compared to other multilateral and bilateral ODA lenders, China’s interest rate is higher and apparently disadvantageous to the Philippine government, as shown by the COA report.
The Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) imposes a nominal interest rate of 0.10% for non-consulting services and 0.01% for consulting services while the Korean government’s Export-Import Bank of Korea has zero interest, the audit report showed.
According to AidData, a US-based research institute, China does not publish a bilateral, country-by-country breakdown of its international development finance activities. Nor does it publish project-level data or detailed information about the less concessional and more commercially oriented financing that it provides.
Lawyer Terry Ridon, convenor of think tank InfraWatch PH, noted the country “paid a high price” in terms of sovereignty in the contested West Philippine Sea as a result of the Chinese loans acquired by the Duterte administration.
“What is more concerning in the spate of Chinese loans and projects during former President Duterte’s term is what we had lost in terms of sovereignty and sovereign rights in the West Philippines Sea in exchange for the promise of massive infrastructure support from Beijing,” Ridon, a former member of the House of Representatives, told MindaNews via Facebook Messenger.
He noted that near the end of Duterte’s six-year term (June 2016 to June 2022), Beijing was a very minor player in the ODA (Official Development Assistance) sector, lagging behind Japan, multilateral lenders and South Korea.
A report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer in May 2021 showed that the level of Chinese loans was only 5.35 percent of the total loans granted by Japan to the Philippines.
“This does not speak well of the level of Chinese commitment to the Philippines particularly in light of what the Duterte government had compromised in our claims in the West Philippine Sea,” Ridon said.
The Chinese-funded Samal-Davao bridge is among the 20 biggest ODA-funded projects the Philippine government has rolled out in the last 10 years.
Thibi, a Singapore-based data consultancy group, provided the dataset after extracting the “List of Active Loans” annex tables from the National Economic and Development Authority’s (NEDA) yearly ODA reports spanning a little over a decade. The dataset, which had to be cleaned further because of duplications, does not have corresponding data for the years 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Based on the net commitment of foreign lenders, the 10 most expensive projects in the Philippines in the last 10 years (2013 to 2023) amounted to $12.02 billion, mostly funded by the Japanese government with $8.56 billion and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) with $3.43 billion.
The Samal-Davao bridge project funded by China is on the 17th spot, according to the Thibi report.
From 2013 to 2023, the Philippines sought ODA loans worth at least $18,639.19 million, 66 percent of which is from Japan at $12,478.17 million, followed by the Asian Development Bank at $3,905.10 million, and the World Bank at $945.20 million.
In 2022, the percentage of debt compared to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) was 57.52%, slightly up from 57.00% in 2021, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.
The debt-to-GDP ratio is a metric that compares a country’s public debt to its GDP. It reliably indicates a country’s ability to pay back its debts by comparing what the country owes with what it produces.
The average interest payments made by the Philippines as a percentage of revenue from 2012 to 2022 stood at 16.42%, according to a World Bank data.
Combining the ODA and other official flows (OOF), the external borrowings of the Philippines in the last 10 years (2012-2022) reached at least $41.93 billion.
ODA includes grants, interest-free loans and concessional loans from first world countries and multilateral lenders to low and middle-income countries. This assistance is designed to promote economic development and welfare in a recipient country, and 25% of it is a grant.
OOF, on the other hand, covers official financing resources that are not qualified for ODA. The grant element is less than 25%, and the financing is more commercial in nature. As such, it is provided on conditions that are closer to market rates.
Less costly, more environment-friendly proposal from Japan
The government awarded the project to CRBC on Aug. 17, 2022, six years after Japan made a study that it could be done at less cost to Filipinos and with less damage to the marine environment, specifically Paradise Reef.
The 2016 study by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) showed that a shorter bridge of 2.62 km could be built at P16.5 billion. It also identified an old shipyard called Bridgeport as the landing site on the Samal side, a kilometer away from Paradise Reef.
Japan’s proposed site would also have less impact on the marine ecosystem because the coral reef in Bridgeport is thinner than those in Paradise Reef.
Factoring in a 3.4% inflation, it would have cost P19.9 billion in 2024, compared to the 2022 P23.04-billion project, 90 % of which will be funded by China.
It’s unclear why the Duterte administration did not choose this option.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) did not object to Japan METI’s proposed project, but also stood by the current alignment where the construction works are now underway.
The chosen alignment straddling the Lucas-Rodriguez property was “the most desired option with the best overall balance of positive outcomes, cost ease of implementation, and minimum negative impact,” the EIA report said, citing the Traffic Study Alignment Development and Preliminary Engineering Workshop on June 21, 2019.
The report did not go into specifics.
A December 2019 study on marine biodiversity in the area commissioned by the Rodriguez-Lucas family showed that the chosen alignment (Station 3) had the highest coral condition and high reef health status, compared with the Japan METI site (Bridgeport or Station 2), and the property the Rodriguez-Lucas family offered to donate near Bridgeport (Station 1).
Coral condition is based on live coral cover, while reef health status is measured by existing marine flora and fauna.
Based on the study, coral condition in the chosen alignment stood at 36.3%, which was considered “fair’’ but was way higher than the 10.4% mentioned by the DPWH in its EIA report.
The Rodriguez-Lucas family, owner of the Paradise Beach Resort, had offered since 2020 to donate a property beside Bridgeport as a landing area, a kilometer away from the Paradise Reef, but to no avail.
Lawyer Ramon Lucas, spokesperson of the Rodriguez-Lucas family, said they are not opposing the bridge project but its alignment, claiming that it is expected to wipe out the reef during its construction.
“It continues to boggle our minds why the DPWH decided to choose the current alignment when there is a better, if not the best, option in terms of both cost and environmental impact,” Lucas told MindaNews, referring to the Japan METI proposal.
The DPWH EIA report was “largely incomplete, misleading, deceptive and highly inaccurate,’’ said marine biologist Filipina Sotto, head of the FBS Environment and Community Research and Development Services team that conducted the study commissioned by the Rodriguez-Lucas family.
Sotto and her team had recommended against building the landing site near Paradise Reef as “it will definitely cause irreparable, irreversible and incalculable damage to the best marine ecosystem in Samal Island that will have adverse ecological impact to the Davao Gulf as a key marine biodiversity area.”
Paradise Reef hosts 79 species of hard corals, 26 species of soft corals and at least 100 species of reef fish, according to the study.
The reef is part of the larger Davao Gulf, the second top cetacean diversity site in the Philippines after the Visayan Sea. The Davao Gulf straddles diverse habitats composed of a wide expanse of seagrass beds, mangroves, diverse coral reefs, and soft bottom communities, according to the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.
Coral reefs, one of the most precious habitats in the ocean earning it the title “Rainforest of the Sea,” hosts numerous species of marine life such as fish, crustaceans (crabs, shrimps and lobsters), mollusks, and sponges, among others.
Coral reef is a complicated ecosystem where thousands of species are supported by some of the smallest of all – corals, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Philippines has the world’s third largest coral habitat at 7,741 square kilometers behind Indonesia (14,173 km2) and Australia (9,416 km2), according to the Washington-based Reef Resilience Network.
Whitewashing environmental impacts
The construction of the Samal-Davao bridge has not been spared from apparent disinformation that circulated on Facebook, including from real estate agents who posted positive imaging of the project.
According to a social media monitoring by Internews under the Media Action for Sustainable Infrastructure in the Philippines (MASIP), the posts involved whitewashing the negative environmental impacts of the SIDC project.
MASIP is a project of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network which aims to strengthen the media’s watchdog role, and raise public awareness on the social and environmental impacts of infrastructure development in the Philippines.
An Internews April–May 2024 monitoring report released in October noted that in a Facebook post on March 23, real estate agent, The Visionary Agent, with 5.6K followers, posted that the SIDC project is a beneficial project between the Philippine government and the Chinese government.
The post claimed that the project’s alignment “was carefully selected after extensive studies for technical, financial, economic, environmental, and social impacts,” contrary to what marine biologists said about the project.
Another post by another real estate agent said “efforts have been made to address environmental concerns, such as the protection of the “Paradise Reef” and compliance with proper procedures related to the turn-over of properties, ensuring the preservation of natural resources.”
Despite the positive imaging about the project, the SIDC project has been suspended multiple times by the DPWH, even before construction went full blast, due to right-of-way acquisition challenges and has drawn flak for its negative environmental impact, the Internews monitoring report noted.
The Rodriguez-Lucas family filed on June 19, 2024 an urgent petition before the Supreme Court to resolve an earlier petition to stop CRBC and the DPWH from proceeding with the project.
The Supreme Court has not ruled on the petition.
Too late to realign?
DPWH officials have maintained that “due diligence” has been done to ensure “lesser environmental impact to the marine biodiversity” on Samal Island.
“The chosen alignment was meticulously studied, taking into consideration the least impact to the environment,” said engineer Rodrigo delos Reyes, project director of the DPWH’s Unified Project Management Office-Bridges Management Cluster.
Road right of way issues have delayed the construction work and pushed back its target completion date from October 2027 to September 2028. There’s a “slim chance’’ of realigning the chosen landing point of the bridge, said delos Reyes.
CRBC’s facilities, including the steel prefabrication plant and the housing units for Chinese skilled workers, were pre-positioned months ago.
As of October 11, the project’s detailed engineering design was 97.9% complete following the recent approvals by the DPWH Bureau of Design for key elements of the substructure and superstructure, bringing the design phase closer to finalization, DPWH Senior Undersecretary Emil Sadain, who signed the contract agreement with the Chinese builder, said in a statement.
The remaining design components, which include ramp sections and various ancillary structures like traffic safety facilities, are currently under review, he added.
In July this year, Sadain said DPWH “is taking proactive measures to ensure that issues are promptly addressed.’’ The goal, he added, was “to keep civil works on schedule, avoiding delays and adhering to the project timeline.”
“We are closely coordinating and monitoring every detail of progress in this project, as we aim to open this bridge to traffic within the term of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.,’’ he said. Marcos ends his six-year term of office on June 30, 2028, a few months shy of the new target completion date.
Trees cut down, too
Environmentalists also noted that not only were corals damaged, at least 486 trees were also cut down to give way to the project, according to DPWH’s delos Reyes.
Of the felled trees, 294 were in Davao City, Mindanao’s premier city where green spaces have become scarcer as massive development swept the area in the last three decades, and 192 in Samal Island.
To compensate for the loss, the DPWH planted “100 trees per fallen tree even before the construction went on full swing in May this year,” delos Reyes said.
Lawyer Mark Peñalver, executive director of the non-profit Interfacing Development Interventions for Sustainability, lambasted the cutting down of trees.
Given the changing climate, each tree counts as it can provide shade during hot weather and help control floodwaters during heavy rains, he told the Davao media.
Writ of Kalikasan remedy
Apart from the Rodriguez-Lucas family’s petition to halt the project, a coalition of environmental and civic organizations called the Sustainable Davao Movement has launched an online signature campaign seeking the realignment of the bridge outside Paradise Reef. As of October 24, it has gathered 9,947 signatures out of the 10,000 signatures, their target for the filing of a writ of kalikasan, a legal remedy available to persons or organizations who believe their right to a balanced and healthful ecology is threatened or violated.
“My lenses will not lie. I can vouch that there are many corals here and their density is thick,” underwater photographer Alfredo Medina told MindaNews, summing up the people’s fears about the destruction of the Paradise Reef teeming with corals and other marine species. (Bong S. Sarmiento / MindaNews)
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Methodology
This environmental data story examined the impact of the Chinese-funded Samal Island – Davao City Connector (SIDC) project on the marine ecosystem in the Island Garden City of Samal (IGaCos), Samal’s official name, particularly to Paradise Reef, a 15,000-meter compact coral reef system that has been thriving for centuries. Construction of the SIDC project, also known as the Samal-Davao bridge, went full-blast in May 2024, after almost two years of delay.
Thibi, a Singapore-based data and design consultancy firm, generated the primary data source from the website of the National Economic and Development Authority. The “List of Active Loans” annex tables from yearly ODA reports spanning 2010 to 2022 were extracted using the ABBYY OCR tool. For the years 2016, 2017, and 2018, the “List of Active Loans” annex tables are missing. Thibi’s aggregated data contain duplications, which were cleaned further using the spreadsheet software program of Microsoft Excel.
We also obtained several data sets and information from sources such as the Commission on Audit, International Monetary Fund, AidData, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Reef Resilience Network, among others.
We also used data from the proponent’s Samal Island – Davao City Connector (SIDC) Project – Environmental Impact Assessment Report and experts’ study titled Biophysical Assessment on the Affected Reefs of the Proposed SIDC Connector Bridge
off the North-western Part of Island Garden City of Samal, Davao del Norte, Philippines.
Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel were used to compile and analyze the data.
The data sets used for this story can be accessed here.
(This story was produced with the support of Internews Earth Journalism Network’s Media Action on Sustainable Infrastructure in the Philippines Project.)