Taiwan has long been plagued by droughts and floods on an almost annual basis.
There has been no obvious change in Taiwan’s average annual rainfall over the past few years. Even for 2002, when Taiwan suffered a serious drought, the average annual rainfall for the year was not substantially lower than that of previous years.
With an island climate and not a dry, continental one, Taiwan’s average rainfall is about 2.6 times the global average. The question therefore is why Taiwan is so bad at conserving water?
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Water Resources Agency have suggested that residents use no more than 250 liters of water per day.
Water can be categorized into three classes, according to the level of water quality that is needed.
The first class is drinking water. Drinking water usually accounts for only one-fifth of a person’s water use each day. Because we drink it, the quality of this water must be the highest.
Second, there is water used for the maintenance of personal hygiene. This includes the water we use to wash our hands, shower or brush our teeth. This category accounts for two-fifths of personal water use on average and the quality is slightly lower as it not meant for drinking.
Finally, we have water for flushing toilets and cleaning. This type of water accounts for almost half of total personal water use and is regarded as the third tier in terms of quality.
Water from reservoirs is filtered and supplied by water companies to consumers for the first and second categories of water.
Taiwan’s many high-tech companies would risk immeasurable losses if water rationing were implemented. The government should therefore chart out its work from the perspectives of water conservation and water resource redistribution.
The Water Resources Agency should cooperate with the Construction and Planning Agency and demand that building proposals include water collection facilities before they are granted construction licenses.
Such facilities in urban areas could catch rainwater, which could then be used as a source of third-class water.
The government should also provide subsidies to the owners of older buildings to install water collection facilities.
These facilities are often referred to as “rainwater recycling systems” in today’s green buildings.
Test results show that these facilities are very effective at catching rainwater.
If more than half of the buildings in a urban area installed water-catching facilities, each building would have its own “mini dam,” which would have a significant effect on the supply of water for the third category.
Taiwan should not run short of water, and yet this happens almost every year.
The government should not have to rely on water rationing or hope that typhoons and tropical storms will replenish water supplies. As we have seen, typhoons can instead be disastrous.
The government should draw up strategies to ensure sustainable management of the nation’s water resources.
It must learn how to manage rainwater effectively, lest it flow into the sea rather than being collected and used.
If this could be accomplished, water rationing, which causes significant economic losses and inconveniences the public, would no longer be necessary.
Jeff Chen is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Institute of Political Science at National Taiwan Normal University.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
After more than a year of review, the National Security Bureau on Monday said it has completed a sweeping declassification of political archives from the Martial Law period, transferring the full collection to the National Archives Administration under the National Development Council. The move marks another significant step in Taiwan’s long journey toward transitional justice. The newly opened files span the architecture of authoritarian control: internal security and loyalty investigations, intelligence and counterintelligence operations, exit and entry controls, overseas surveillance of Taiwan independence activists, and case materials related to sedition and rebellion charges. For academics of Taiwan’s White Terror era —
After 37 US lawmakers wrote to express concern over legislators’ stalling of critical budgets, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) pledged to make the Executive Yuan’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.7 billion) special defense budget a top priority for legislative review. On Tuesday, it was finally listed on the legislator’s plenary agenda for Friday next week. The special defense budget was proposed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration in November last year to enhance the nation’s defense capabilities against external threats from China. However, the legislature, dominated by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), repeatedly blocked its review. The
In her article in Foreign Affairs, “A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026?,” Yun Sun (孫韻), director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that the US has grown indifferent to Taiwan, contending that, since it has long been the fear of US intervention — and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to prevail against US forces — that has deterred China from using force against Taiwan, this perceived indifference from the US could lead China to conclude that a window of opportunity for a Taiwan invasion has opened this year. Most notably, she observes that
RSS