The Spatial Planning Act (國土計畫法) should be implemented in April next year as planned to prevent flagrant development of public land intended for agricultural use, environmental groups said yesterday.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Yi-yu (蔡易餘) and 21 other legislators on Wednesday last week told a news conference that the act should be delayed, citing the failure of nine local governments, including seven headed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members, to submit zoning maps ahead of a deadline.
The central government must also better communicate with the public before pushing the act through, Tsai said.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
However, members of 34 environmental groups yesterday urged the government to push through the legislation according to schedule, as doing so would create a basis for interministerial integration of land-planning efforts.
Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan deputy director Huang Ching-ting (黃靖庭) said that efforts to increase the use of green energy have been hampered due to lack of a mechanism to integrate ecological and environmental issues with social and economic development.
The act would allow progress on the issue by facilitating the integration of government agencies and committees, Huang said.
Tai Hsing-sheng (戴興盛), a professor of natural resources and environmental studies at National Dong Hwa University, agreed that the land planning act should be enacted as scheduled, as it would allow better cooperation and discussion of land planning by economy and agriculture officials.
“There are some things that take much time to learn. For example, we learned about the greenhouse effect from more than a century of burning fossil fuels,” Tai said. “However, through adaptive governance and reasoning, preliminary judgements about energy policy can be arrived at, and rolling adjustments can be made.”
Although the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture published separate white papers on land use, integrating their findings would be most effectively achieved through the spatial planning act, he said, adding that the legislation would also facilitate the integration of ideas from experts in energy and other fields.
Liao Kuei-hsien (廖桂賢), an associate professor in National Taipei University’s Graduate Institute of Urban Planning and convener of the Taiwan Rivers Network, told the Central News Agency that the proposed legislation would help solve the chaos of arbitrary development on land that falls outside the scope of urban planning.
Putting the act into effect is “urgent,” Liao said, adding that a comprehensive review of the legislation would be conducted every five years.
However, Liao said she believes that the current version of the act is not strict enough and would result in the loss of some agricultural land.
Although agricultural output value is low relative to the output of other sectors, agricultural land produces less environmental pollution and other problems compared with industrial land, she said.
“Current planning focuses on the development of artificial intelligence and other high-tech industries, but planners should not put all their eggs in one basket,” she said. “We hope better controls would be put into place so that we do not end up with unrestricted industrial development on agricultural land.
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