Social benefits and impacts of mangrove resource utilization in Rio Tuba, Bataraza, Palawan, Philippines

The study is designed to investigate the profile and attitude of the community towards the use of mangroves, and their impacts and threats to mangrove forests in a heavily populated coastal area in southern Palawan, Philippines. The study used the Slovin's formula with 5% margin of error to determine the number of household respondents. The descriptive statistics used the percentage, frequency, mean analysis and formulas to compute for charcoal consumption. Respondents were selected by systematic sampling based on the household list from the Village Secretary. More than half (59%) of the respondents are female, 94.7% of which are married. More than half of the respondents are native Palaweño, 8.0% of which belong to the indigenous group, Palao'an. Educational attainment is low, and 27% of the population are recent immigrants, coming from other municipalities of Palawan looking for work. The population of the community is relatively young. The average age of household heads is 39, while female spouses averages 36. Women heads only 2.8% of the households, and 11 is the average age of children. Male-female ratio is 1:1.23, and the average household size is 4.7 family members. The most popular communication device is mobile phone. Household income is from labor and services, in which the average gross annual income is higher than the per capita poverty threshold in Palawan. Majority of the wives are engaged in non-income-generating activities. The respondents view mangrove forests and trees as important and need protection, because it give direct benefits to the community in the form of materials for housing and charcoal. Tan-barking from mangrove is not popular anymore. The knowledge of the community regarding the status, biodiversity function, and socio-economic services of mangrove forests is very low. Rio Tuba uses up 92.2 tons of mangrove charcoal per month. The Rio Tuba community consumes an estimated biomass of equivalent to 1,024 (30 cm-BHD) mangrove trees in a month. Aside from charcoal production, housing material is another major threat to the mangrove forest. List of recommendations are provided in this study.