Taiwan’s current energy and food situation is unsustainable — and an alarming security issue.
Emma Sky, an expert on conflict and reconciliation and director of Yale University’s International Leadership Center, says that tackling climate change and shoring up Taiwan’s security are two sides of the same coin.
“Taiwan imports 97 percent of its energy, two-thirds of its food — that’s not sustainable, that’s not moving towards net zero,” she says, adding: “what you need to address climate change is the same as what you need to do to become more resilient to withstand the squeeze from China.”
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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
She adds that since COVID and the rise in global tensions, countries are “derisking,” by shrinking supply chains, and focusing on food production at home — changes that Taiwan needs to accelerate.
“Food, energy and water security makes Taiwan more capable of coping with a strangulation of a blockade and those types of scenarios,” she says.
Sky, who spent years advising the US military in Iraq and later fostering Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, will draw on her extensive experience in conflict resolution to discuss the reasons why climate change should form the centerpiece of all government policy.
Photo courtesy of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation
The speech, titled Peace Does Not Come Through Passivity and open to the public, will be held tomorrow evening in Taipei and moderated by Lung Yingtai (龍應台), a former minister of culture and founder of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation.
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