By Chito Chavez With the approaching May 13, 2019 mid-term polls, environmental advocate EcoWaste Coalition asked the country’s estimated 61,843,750 registered voters to select candidates who will take up the cudgels for the people’s ecological rights. This was pointed out by EcoWaste Coalition stressing the need for voters to elect true champions for the environment with the impacts of climate change, marine pollution and hazardous waste trade becoming grave concerns globally. “As we mark the Earth Day on April 22, we call upon all registered voters to pick national and local candidates and party-list groups who will genuinely work with and for the people in ensuring a clean, healthy, safe and sustainable environment for all,” said Aileen Lucero, National Coordinator, EcoWaste Coalition. At the Senate and the House of Representatives, Lucero cited the need for “legislative leaders who will defend existing pollution prevention laws such as the ban on waste incineration and who will take the lead in ensuring the enactment of long overdue environmental acts such as the ban on single-use plastic and the ban on foreign waste importation’’. “We need senators and representatives across the political spectrum who will actively engage in getting national laws and regulations adopted to protect the environment against further degradation and uphold environmental health and justice,” Lucero said. Lucero noted the group “is very much concerned with increasing chemical and plastic pollution that poses serious threat to the health of the overall environment, especially the world’s oceans’’. “At the provincial, city and municipal councils, we need to install grassroots lawmakers who will file and fight for ordinances aimed at protecting the public health and the environment,” she added. Lucero has batted for local government units (LGU) promulgating ordinances that will ‘promote health and safety and enhance the right of the people to a balanced ecology’ in line with the general welfare clause of Republic Act 7160, or the Local Government Code,” she said. “We need more local government executives who possess the political will to promote and uphold the environmental rights of their constituents,” Lucero noted. "Environmental rights," according to the Friends of the Earth International, "are human rights, as people's livelihoods, their health, and sometimes their very existence depend upon the quality of and their access to the surrounding environment as well as the recognition of their rights to information, participation, security and redress."