Addressing some of the environmental challenges Taiwan will face in the next decade, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said yesterday that a future DPP government would focus on long-term solutions rather than short-term fixes.
Environmental activists, experts and DPP officials met yesterday in the second of a series of forums titled “Taiwan’s unavoidable future challenges” designed to help the party draw up its “10 Year Political Master Plan.”
Officials hope that the political agenda will show the party’s supporters it is ready to govern again.
Issues covered at the forum included methods to reduce Taiwan’s dependence on external energy sources, protecting water resources and the effects that global warming will have on the country.
“We are looking for ways Taiwan can survive in a world that is running out of resources,” National Taiwan University professor Wu Tsung-tsong (吳政忠) said. “Dealing with these problems will require ambitious, far-reaching policies.”
The latest government statistics show that more than 99 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, while annual carbon emissions are 2.5 times the world average.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), under pressure to fulfill a promise to reduce 2020 emissions to 2005 levels, has announced plans to open the nation’s fourth nuclear power plant by October next year.
Wu said that it was “almost impossible” for the government to reach its target because of a delay to the date Taiwan is expected to reach its peak energy usage — the highest amount of emissions produced — from 2015 to between 2016 and 2020.
He said nuclear energy was not the answer to the country’s future energy needs, adding that it was debatable whether nuclear power should be classified as “clean energy.”
Instead, Wu called on the government to encourage more investment in renewable energy resources.
He said that in the next two years, “the government needs cross-departmental support for a sweeping new energy policy,” and in the long-term, it needs to privatize Taiwan Power Co (台電) and create “reasonable and transparent” renewable energy prices.
Taiwan Ecological Engineering Department Foundation director and former head of Chunghwa Telecom Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) said another issue was dwindling water supplies.
“We haven’t been doing enough to preserve water supplies,” Ho said. “We treat it like a commodity that needs to be made cheaper and wasted more.”
A future DPP administration should increase the price of water, he said, citing examples such as Denmark, where water is five times more expensive than it is in Taiwan.
Efforts to resolve water supply problems in the south should also take into account Aboriginal interests, Taiwan Aboriginal Society chairman Wang Ming-huei (汪明輝) said.
He said that government proposals to build dams and riverbank developments have gone ahead despite Aboriginal concerns about the negative environmental effects. Wang said the government had botched reconstruction efforts after Typhoon Morakot because of a lack of “cultural understanding and respect.”
“Some of the developments we have seen on Aboriginal land following the typhoon include betel nut, coffee and tea plantations on mountain slopes,” Wang said. “We have not received any benefits from this, instead the environment has worsened.”
Speaking after the forum, Tsai promised to address the concerns raised, saying that the DPP viewed addressing environmental concerns as an “unavoidable responsibility.”
“Taiwan faces a great threat from global warming,” Tsai said. “The way we see it, energy and the environment ... need to be dealt with in the medium to long-term vision of the country’s development. It needs to be far reaching and include a change in our basic framework.”
A magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck off Tainan at 11:47am today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The hypocenter was 32.3km northeast of Tainan City Hall at a depth of 7.3km, CWA data showed. The intensity of the quake, which gauges the actual effect of a seismic event, measured 4 in Tainan and Chiayi County on Taiwan's seven-tier intensity scale, the data showed. The quake had an intensity of 3 in Chiayi City and County, and Yunlin County, while it was measured as 2 in Kaohsiung, Nantou County, Changhua County, Taitung County and offshore Penghu County, the data showed. There were no immediate reports of
Weather conditions across Taiwan are expected to remain stable today, but cloudy to rainy skies are expected from tomorrow onward due to increasing moisture in the atmosphere, according to the Central Weather Administration (CWA). Daytime highs today are expected to hit 25-27°C in western Taiwan and 22-24°C in the eastern counties of Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung, data on the CWA website indicated. After sunset, temperatures could drop to 16-17°C in most parts of Taiwan. For tomorrow, precipitation is likely in northern Taiwan as a cloud system moves in from China. Daytime temperatures are expected to hover around 25°C, the CWA said. Starting Monday, areas
Taiwan has recorded its first fatal case of Coxsackie B5 enterovirus in 10 years after a one-year-old boy from southern Taiwan died from complications early last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. CDC spokesman Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) told a news conference that the child initially developed a fever and respiratory symptoms before experiencing seizures and loss of consciousness. The boy was diagnosed with acute encephalitis and admitted to intensive care, but his condition deteriorated rapidly, and he passed away on the sixth day of illness, Lo said. This also marks Taiwan’s third enterovirus-related death this year and the first severe
A Taiwanese software developer has created a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model to help people use AI without exposing sensitive data, project head Huang Chung-hsiao (黃崇校) said yesterday. Huang, a 55-year-old coder leading a US-based team, said that concerns over data privacy and security in popular generative AIs such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek motivated him to develop a personal AI assistant named “Mei.” One of the biggest security flaws with cloud-based algorithms is that users are required to hand over personal information to access the service, giving developers the opportunity to mine user data, he said. For this reason, many government agencies and
RSS