Madrono Cabrestante Jr.

Madrono Cabrestante Jr. is Division Chief of Environmentally Critical Areas Network Monitoring and Evaluation at the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD), the management authority of Palawan Biosphere Reserve, Philippines.  Since 2015, he manages and coordinates the Palawan Knowledge Platform for Biodiversity and Sustainable Development (https://pkp-new.pcsd.gov.ph) a knowledge-sharing platform comprised of more than 30 higher education, government, and civil society research institutions.  He is a technical editor/co-author  of the 2015 and 2020 Reports on the State of the Environment of Palawan, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve; editor of PCSD’s Scientific Journal ‘Our Palawan’ from 2015 to date; and co-author of the recent publication of the University of Sydney: ’Palawan, Philippines: State of the Marine Environment 2024 and the Nearshore Marine Benthic Features of Palawan, Philippines’.  Currently, he co-leads the Marine Resources Initiative, a project funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and co-implemented by Geoscience Australia and the University of Sydney. Madrono’s research interests are in biosphere reserve management and development, land use-land cover change, and water quality and heavy metals & plastics pollution of coastal-marine ecosystems.  

Background

Madrono was a Fellow at the Center for International Postgraduate Studies on Environmental Management in 2010 in Technische  Universität Dresden, Saxony, Germany, and holds a certificate in Environmental Monitoring from UNESCO Institute of Higher Education-Water Education in Delft, The Netherlands. He has a masters in Environmental Management and a BS in Agricultural Engineering. He served as management committee member of the Institute of Environmental Governance of Palawan State University; project coordinator of zero carbon resorts project funded by the SwitchAsia Programme of the European Union; and project supervisor of the ADB-Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction 9160 in the Philippines. 

Madrono served as the focal person for the Palawan Biosphere Reserve (BR) from 2015 to 2014, which afforded him opportunities to talk in UNESCO conferences/workshops: sustainable tourism for blue/green livelihoods (Samoa, 2018), renewable energies in BRs (Germany, 2017), and management of biosphere reserves (Cambodia, 2014; Philippines, 2022).