While much of the media’s attention has been on next Saturday’s elections, Beijing’s manipulation efforts and the protests racking Hong Kong, the Taiwan Disaster Prevention Industry Association yesterday chose to focus on the bigger picture, with a grim prognostication for the nation this year regardless of which political party is in power come May 20.
As of this year, Taiwan has officially entered a climate emergency, the association said.
It cited the Oxford Dictionaries’ choice of the term — defined as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it” — as its word of the year for last year.
The association’s warning comes just over six months after more than 30 groups marched in Taipei calling on the government to declare a climate emergency and urging politicians to pay more attention to climate issues that pose a threat to national security.
Given the scope of climate disasters facing two other nations in the region — the raging bushfires in Australia that have so far consumed at least 5 million hectares, killed an estimated half-billion native animals and almost a score of people, and the widescale flooding in Jakarta this week that has killed at least an equal number of people — it might be tempting to dismiss the association’s declaration on Taiwan as crying wolf.
However, it is exactly the scope of those disasters that makes it essential for Taiwanese to heed the association’s warning, for as several of its members said, despite all of the attention on international efforts to reduce carbon emissions and the debate over the cause and effect of global warming, many nations are failing to ensure that disaster prevention efforts are keeping pace with a rapidly changing climate.
The Environmental Protection Administration, in a press release on Nov. 13 last year, said that the government had created a National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan aimed at responding to eight aspects of climate change, but since the headline was “Taiwan can be a valuable partner in the global response to climate change,” cynics might question whether the action plan was little more than a public relations effort.
The association certainly seems to believe that the government should do more.
It urged the government to take more concrete measures by establishing a carbon reduction plan and long-term carbon neutrality goals, creating a national land plan that could respond to climate risks, building a complete disaster prevention legal system, and creating a mechanism to integrate the disaster prevention units of ministries and departments.
While the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said that the monsoon rain that fell on Tuesday — the most in a single day in more than two decades — was “not ordinary rain,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo blamed delays in flood-control infrastructure projects for the severity of Jakarta’s flooding.
A 2018 report by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said that as spring rainfall has declined in recent decades, extreme heat events have become more common and droughts more severe, leading to a greater number of days with very high fire dangers, but the country’s top leaders have continued to downplay the dangers posed by climate change, just as they earlier dismissed the need to boost national defenses against bushfires and other natural disasters.
Tuesday closed out Australia’s hottest-ever decade, the same day that the Central Weather Bureau announced that Taiwan last year saw its highest average temperature on record since 1947, 24.56°C.
While some of that heat should be turned on national leaders who place more value on economic growth than natural systems and the global environment, the public must realize that the time for complacency is long past.
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