United
Nations NGO Sustainability
"Sustainable Development is development that
meets the needs of the present
without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"
People
Delfin
J. GanapinDelfin Ganapin Jr. was trained to be a scientist, having been given a scholarship at the Manila Science High School where he graduated in 1971 with 3 academic gold medals : for Academic Excellence, the National Teachers College Model Student Award and the Gerry Roxas Leadership Award. At the College of Forestry he organized and headed the Samahang Ekolohiya, the first environmental organization at the time, as well as the Society of Future Filipino Foresters’. Upon graduation in 1977, he was thus given the Society of Filipino Forester's Leadership Award, the Chancellor's Pin, the Medal of Excellence in Forest Biological Sciences and the distinction of being the first post-war Magna cum laude graduate of the UPLB College of Forestry. He decided to go on with the academic life and became a faculty of the College of Forestry from 1977 up to 1988 when he also finished his Master's, major in Forest Ecology, as a SEARCA scholar. He then went on to get his his Ph.D. in Environmental Planning and Policy from the State University of New York and Syracuse University in 1987. In between teaching, he organized the first federation of environmental groups in the country, the Philippine Federation for Environmental Concerns (PFEC), as well as a national network of upland farmers and pioneered in social forestry and upland development as an academic, consultant and activist. For all these works, he was selected as the Most Outstanding Young Forester in 1986, a ¡§Likas Yaman¡ (Natural Wealth) Awardee in 1988 and was a Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) of the Philippines for 1987. He was a consultant in USAID's Rainfed Resources Development Program, working with shifting cultivators, when government spotted him and gave him an appointment. This started his stint in government, first as Director of the Environmental Management Bureau, then as OIC Undersecretary for Environment and Research in the Aquino Administration from 1989- 92 then again in the Ramos Administration from 1995 -1998 as Undersecretary for Environment and Program Development. In government he is known to have started the practice of requiring the logging, as well as the mining industry to do an EIA and have an Environmental Compliance Certificate, even proof of Social Acceptability, before their operations could be approved. For the difficult work he did in government, he received the Most Distinguished University of the Philippines at Los Banos (UPLB) Alumnus Award in 1997. After government, he worked as consultant of the UNDP, ADB, World Bank, USAID and USAid on environmental planning, program development, policy analysis, and strategic assessments and evaluations. UNDP New York eventually selected him in April 2003 to manage one of the flagship programs of the Global Environmental Facility, the GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) having been a long standing member and Chair on various occasions of the National Steering Committee of SGP Philippines. He was also a member of the GEF Council on two occasions and of the Executive Committee of the Multilateral Fund of the Montreal Protocol. His international environment work also included involvement in the negotiations for the biodiversity and climate change conventions as well as leading senior Philippine environment officials to the Earth Summit and succeeding UNCSDs. He also chaired senior environment official meetings of the ASEAN and APEC. In his present post as Global Manager of the GEF Small Grants Programme, he supervises and coordinates the programme in 84 countries (as of July 2005) and strategically plans the support allocation for the more than 5,000 community projects worldwide.