More than eight out of ten Filipinos support the efforts of Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Gina Lopez to protect the environment from the threats posed by irresponsible mining.
According to Gil Ramos of Survey ng Bayan (SNB), a nationwide survey conducted from April 24 to 26 revealed that 83.6% of 3,495 Filipinos polled answered “oo” (yes) when asked the question “Suportado mo ba si Sec. Gina Lopez ng DENR sa pagprotekta ng kapaligiran at likas-yaman laban sa irresponsabling minahan?” (Do you support the efforts of DENR Sec. Gina Lopez to protect the environment and our natural resources from irresponsible mining?)
Ramos explained that “using a randomly extracted query set from SNB’s 180 million cell numbers in use in the Philippines, SNB conducted a nationwide cell phone survey” that obtained 5,514 initial replies.
“After deduping and clean up, a net response set with 3,495 replies was analyzed with the following results: OO 83.6%; HINDI 6.2% and No Answer 10.2%,” said Ramos, who holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Hawaii and has Big Data Analytics experience with both IBM and SAS Institute tools.
“The respondents mostly came from the 26 to 75 age range. Responses were received from 350 plus separate points in the archipelago nationwide. Results are statistically valid at the 99 percent level of confidence with a 2.2 percent margin of error,” the pollster said.
SNB is a public opinion research group composed of Filipino social researchers based in the Philippines and in the United States, as well as other research and information service professionals.
The polling firm has in its databank 180.2 million Philippine-based cell phone numbers. SNB then randomly picks a query set of 100,000 to 200,000 cell phone numbers for any survey and sends its questions to all of them via SMS.
The 180.2 million cell phone pool used by SNB in its random extraction of query sets for SMS blasting exceeds the total number of estimated mobile connections and is much larger than the total population of the country because some individuals may own several cell phones. The databank also includes numbers that might have expired and makes allowances for short self-life pay-as-you-go cell phone sim cards.
Lopez is set to face the Commission on Appointments (CA) this week, just a few days after she announced that the DENR would be banning all prospective open pit mines in the country because of their financial and environmental liabilities as well as their adverse impact on the environment.