00:00Well, when I became the Secretary of Science and Technology in 2022, I crafted four strategic pillars that would support the socio-economic development of the country, but address the four aspirations that every human being in the world would want, the longer and better quality of life, right?
00:25We promote human being. But again, protecting and managing the environment is also ensuring quality of life. Second is to foster wealth creation, create wealth, and also to protect the wealth because of the natural hazards that the Philippines would experience normally plus the ongoing climate change.
00:48And the climate change exacerbates the hazards that we naturally have. And climate change is also influenced by the actions that we human beings do. So again, going back to the environment, it's really very important for us to call that climate change.
01:06The fourth is to institutionalize sustainability. For us, institutionalizing sustainability is critical because most of the wealth that we get would come from natural resources and things that we plant or we fish or we get from the ocean.
01:24For us to ensure that tomorrow's people, mga kababayan natin in the future will still benefit from the resources that we benefit from today, we have to make sure that it is managed today.
01:40But how do we do it? But how do we do it? We said that we need to engage, not only doing research, but engage the different sectors of society. One would be the business sector, the industry, and the local governments.
01:56So we crafted the smart and sustainable communities program. We have partners from cities, from towns, or even provinces. Like Batanes, they want the whole province sustainable.
02:09And we cannot do that also. Again, we need to partner with other government agencies and the industry.
02:16Because, you know, what we want, what they want are all the same. We still live in the same place. We will face the same problems. We're just working in government or in the industry.
02:27So, the best thing to do is partner with them. And that is why, when we developed our Science Technology Innovation for Circular Economy framework,
02:38we presented this to different partners and it so happened that they are also interested in working with us on many things like plastics.
02:49And so, the strategy that we created and the desire for the industry partners to really focus on things that can help the environment and make it less polluted and actually reverse what's happening
03:03It would be a natural consequence of that the same desires have better quality of life.
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