The Legislative Assembly (LA) held a session last November 19 in order to discuss resolutions calling for the release of the manifesto on the United Nations’ (UN) 2030 Climate Change Deadline and for the amendments to the University Student Government (USG) Executive Treasurer’s Manual, among other matters.
Manifesto on the UN’s 2030 Climate Change Deadline
The brunt of the session was spent on discussing revisions to the manifesto addressing the recent UN report that if greenhouse gas emission is not addressed, global temperatures will have risen by 1.5°C by the year 2030, at which point the worst effects of climate change will begin to take effect.
The most significant changes to the manifesto have been to change the call to action’s focus from reducing meat consumption to a more general zero-waste lifestyle for us citizens of the Philippines, and also an addition of a wherefore statement to forward the manifesto to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
Other changes include trimming out redundancies in statements for brevity, rearranging the structure of the manifesto for clarity, and adjusting punctuations and wordings for grammatical consistency.
Amendments to the Treasurer’s Manual
The discussions regarding amendments to the Treasurer’s Manual was supposed to be held in a previous LA Session last November 9. However, as quorum was not met at the time, their decisions were yet to be approved.
Because of this, the amendments were approved swiftly during the session. A section on the Request for Procurement of Services and Materials was added and changes to the structuring of the letters to update for this year’s Executive Treasurer as last year’s Treasurer was still listed on the template.
On other matters
Chief Legislator Norbs Sarigumba also tackled and stressed the importance of attendance in future sessions, as there have been struggles throughout the term to meet quorum, with some sessions needing to be cancelled as a result of low attendance.
He reminded the legislators that in the following terms this problem is going to be more difficult to resolve. Thus, he stressed that they must resolve this early on to ensure a healthy attendance rate in the future in order to fulfill their responsibilities as representatives of the students.
Discussed as well was the nearing retirement of Sarigumba whose last LA session will be on November 26, who has given a week for the LA members to come up with nominations and platforms for the aspirants who intend to take over the position of Chief Legislator.
