Philippines fast-tracks critical minerals, raising Indigenous, environmental concerns

An Aug. 18 executive order from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. creates a national framework to accelerate critical-mineral development, identifying 9 million hectares of prospective mineral land — more than 11 times the area currently under approved mining projects — and directing permits to be processed simultaneously rather than sequentially.

The Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center warns that 54% of existing approved mining area already overlaps ancestral domains, and that simultaneous processing risks securing communities' free, prior and informed consent before they've seen a project's actual environmental impacts. A Pala'wan leader in Palawan, where nickel mining has already damaged his community's territory, said there is practically nowhere left to mine that isn't forest or ancestral land.

The mining industry, unsurprisingly, called the streamlined permitting 'particularly encouraging.' The environment department did not respond to questions about how it would protect consent processes under the new timeline, and the order itself simply asserts that development will proceed 'alongside' environmental and community protection.

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