Philippine E-Journals

Development of Authentic Information Education and Communication (IEC) Materials to Increase Public Awareness on Mt. Matutum Protected Landscape (MMPL) Conservation Initiatives in the Philippines

Ava Clare Marie O. Robles | George S. Gunay | Maximo C. Aljibe | Edna P. Oconer

Discipline: Ecology

 

Abstract:

Environmental conservation advocacy forms an important step towards environmental preservation. It serves as a benchmark in coming up with strategies to protect and preserve species that have been marked as threatened or endangered. In the Philippine context, pressing concerns on overexploitation of biological resources and caustic harvesting techniques in Mt. Matutum have been altering the distribution and abundance of its flora and fauna. Thus, the preservation of Mt. Matutum Protected Landscape (MMPL) is considered an imperative. In response, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has recently funded a program for the biodiversity assessment of MMPL. However, provision for a more responsive initiative is needed. It is on this premise that this study was conducted to develop authentic IEC materials to increase the biodiversity conservation awareness of the local people in the MMPL. In addition, the developed materials were validated by various experts in order to ensure that local people became more environmentally knowledgeable and dedicated to maintaining or sustaining the quality of life and biodiversity of the MMPL. Nonetheless, there were 130 randomly selected respondents from the local communities in MMPL. The research design is descriptive and utilized quantitative and qualitative methods of data gathering. The findings of the study showed that the IEC materials were authentic and had a high extent of content validity (wm=4.03 for video and wm=4.14 for printed). Moreover, the evaluators considered the materials as very highly usable (wm=4.10 for video and wm=4.25 for printed materials). This indicates that IEC materials were very useful to increase the public awareness of the local people in conserving MMPL.