The nation is parched, reservoir levels are low and a drought looms. It was against this backdrop that Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said he was hoping a typhoon would come along soon to offer some respite. This comment was roundly criticized.
It is only March and the typhoon season is four or five months away. Saying you hope a typhoon will come soon to drown out the drought does not make sense. While it is true that typhoons do bring rain, they cause a lot of damage. In 2009, the Water Resources Agency praised Typhoon Morakot for the much-needed water it brought — the highest amount of rainfall in 50 years — that filled the reservoirs to the brim and ended a drought. However, with such heavy rainfall over such a short period came much destruction and more than 600 lives were lost.
Rainfall during the typhoon season accounts for more than 55 percent of the nation’s annual water supply. They are the main source of water, followed by the East Asian rainy season, or plum rains, in late spring and early summer. It makes more sense, then, to put one’s hope in the plum rains, not some premature typhoon.
Taiwan is surrounded on all sides by water and it rains frequently. The public need to learn how to have a positive relationship with weather fronts and typhoons, and to value the rain they bring.
Although it rains often, the rivers running down from the mountains are relatively short and rapid-flowing because of the steep gradient, and storing the run-off presents a problem. The public is often unaware of the importance of conserving water until a drought hits.
The government should not have to pray for rain. Its job is to review the nation’s water usage strategy and to decide how much water is allocated for industrial use and how much for the general public. Naturally, the priority should go to the latter, but when water resources are low, it is only right that swimming pools and car washes are among the first things to be restricted.
Water-intensive farming also needs to be addressed during times of shortage, by controlling the water supply or even by encouraging a change to drought-resistant crops.
The water allocation policy needs to be rethought for water-intensive industrial processes by, for example, requiring companies to increase their use of untreated water.
If the government is concerned about droughts, it should be looking at the use and reuse of existing water resources, and perhaps also at setting the price of water at levels that will encourage the public to conserve it. If all the sewage treatment plants nationwide were operational and half of the 3.8 million tonnes of water used every day was recycled, we would not need to build another reservoir.
The nation already has many reservoirs. Unfortunately, they are prone to getting clogged up by silt from the deforested mountainous regions, helped along by frequent earthquakes and landslides. This silt not only reduces the capacity and operational lifespan of reservoirs, it is expensive to remove. The government should think about how to maintain upstream regions and protect the environment in those areas, to help keep reservoirs free of silt.
As global climate change exacerbates the cycle of droughts and floods, it is going to take more than simply regulating the supply and allocation of water resources to ensure our water needs are met. The government is going to need to come up with a national land usage and industrial restructuring plan, including land development, allocation and usage, a move away from water-intensive industries and a more efficient supply of water resources.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
RSS