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
In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?” It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.” In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP)
The scuffle between Chinese embassy staffers in Fiji and a Taiwanese diplomat at a Republic of China (ROC) Double Ten National Day celebration has turned into a public relations opportunity for the government, Beijing and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Although the incident occurred on Oct. 8, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) downplayed it, only for the story to be picked up by the foreign media, forcing the ministry to respond. The public and opposition parties asked why the government had failed to remonstrate more strongly in the first instance. It is still unclear whether the ministry missed a trick
US President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, former US vice president Joe Biden, are holding their final debate tonight. In their foreign policy debate, China is sure to be a major issue of contention for the two candidates. Here are several questions the moderator should pose to the candidates: For both: In the first televised US presidential debates in 1960, then-Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy and his Republican counterpart, Richard Nixon, were asked whether the US should intervene if communist China attacked Taiwan’s outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu. Kennedy said no, unless the main island of Taiwan was also attacked.
For most of us, the colorful, otherworldly marinescapes of coral reefs are as remote as the alien landscapes of the moon. We rarely, if ever, experience these underwater wonderlands for ourselves — we are, after all, air-breathing, terrestrial creatures mostly cocooned in cities. It is easy not to notice the perilous state they are in: We have lost 50 percent of coral reefs in the past 20 years and more than 90 percent are expected to die by 2050, a presentation at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego, California, earlier this year showed. As the oceans heat further and
RSS