The pressure placed by floods and droughts will increase. Careful planning is needed, while engineering should be only the final stage in the process.
The view that humans can conquer nature has long prevailed and is an extremely dangerous concept. Both structural and non-structural approaches to diminishing the impact of natural disasters should be considered, but we place too high an expectation on structural approaches, such as continuing to raise embankments and dredging rivers.
The sudden drastic increase in rain in recent years means that building embankments will not be an effective way to prevent flooding. The most effective approach to flood prevention is to find ways to coexist with water and natural disasters by relying on non-engineering flood prevention strategies that work together with the local geography, environment and urban characteristics to return water to the rivers.
Rainstorm management can be effectively integrated with urban water resource management by taking a three-dimensional approach to water conservation. It is not about removing the water, but keeping it in appropriate places, at the same time as considering damage control, pollution prevention, erosion, climate change adaptation and economic efficiency.
Urban water management should start with a focus on paths and total volumes, and it should include accumulation and seep-through mechanisms.
“Accumulation” means providing the possibility of temporarily keeping water at a suitable location, such as a square, a park, a school playground, the atrium of a big building, or other similar locations. Spaces of various sizes can be used for this function, with each location functioning as a storage pool that will diminish surface runoff and peak flood concentrations. These pools can also accumulate rainwater for recycling.
“Seep-through” means allowing water to flow vertically instead of horizontally and letting water purify through the seep-through process, while also replenishing the groundwater. This would also help prevent water from collecting rapidly in one particular place.
Rainstorm management should include countermeasures for spaces of different scale, with plans for the national, regional and urban level. Much research has built up about Taiwan’s environmentally sensitive areas, and this research could be used to create overlay maps to define areas where development should be banned, restricted or allowed.
It should also be possible to take advantage of national land planning to properly prepare different locations to aid in water management. For example in terms of urban planning, consideration should be given to the potential risk for floods when developing new areas, and controls should be applied on land use and urban design based on the special characteristics of rainstorms. In addition, landscape design and water conservation could be integrated by directing urban flood water and purifying surface runoff.
However, rainfall in Taiwan can be very heavy, and any individual facility will have only a limited effect. Only by joining all facilities into a networked system that can deal with the accumulation and use of water in a larger area, will it be possible to turn often damaging water into a resource.
At the individual locations, existing open spaces, unused land and open spaces in direct connection to buildings should be redesigned into key locations for regulating, stopping and accumulating flood water, and each location should also collect local rainwater. In new land developments, overall consideration should be given to the use of and recycling of water resources by minimizing excavation in order to maximize seep-through area in combination with a system for collecting rainwater for recycling.
As the frequency of natural disasters increases and their impact becomes increasingly severe, it seems that major disasters are becoming a part of life, and water plays an important role.
As a result of the increasingly large expropriations and redesign of land in recent years, large areas of agricultural and forest land have been turned into construction sites, which means that land use is going through planned transformation on a large scale.
If we continue to rely on traditional methods, the risk will remain unchanged. We must change our attitude toward natural disasters, and if we want to address the cause of the problem, attitudes and policies need to change because water will always find ways to get through.
Using appropriate space planning and design is the way to go if we are to be able to coexist with water. Whether or not that will be possible will of course depend on the government’s vision and resolve.
Wang Jieh-jiuh is an associate professor of architecture at Ming Chuan University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
In the event of a war with China, Taiwan has some surprisingly tough defenses that could make it as difficult to tackle as a porcupine: A shoreline dotted with swamps, rocks and concrete barriers; conscription for all adult men; highways and airports that are built to double as hardened combat facilities. This porcupine has a soft underbelly, though, and the war in Iran is exposing it: energy. About 39,000 ships dock at Taiwan’s ports each year, more than the 30,000 that transit the Strait of Hormuz. About one-fifth of their inbound tonnage is coal, oil, refined fuels and liquefied natural gas (LNG),
On Monday, the day before Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) departed on her visit to China, the party released a promotional video titled “Only with peace can we ‘lie flat’” to highlight its desire to have peace across the Taiwan Strait. However, its use of the expression “lie flat” (tang ping, 躺平) drew sarcastic comments, with critics saying it sounded as if the party was “bowing down” to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Amid the controversy over the opposition parties blocking proposed defense budgets, Cheng departed for China after receiving an invitation from the CCP, with a meeting with
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is leading a delegation to China through Sunday. She is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing tomorrow. That date coincides with the anniversary of the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which marked a cornerstone of Taiwan-US relations. Staging their meeting on this date makes it clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intends to challenge the US and demonstrate its “authority” over Taiwan. Since the US severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has relied on the TRA as a legal basis for all
To counter the CCP’s escalating threats, Taiwan must build a national consensus and demonstrate the capability and the will to fight. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) often leans on a seductive mantra to soften its threats, such as “Chinese do not kill Chinese.” The slogan is designed to frame territorial conquest (annexation) as a domestic family matter. A look at the historical ledger reveals a different truth. For the CCP, being labeled “family” has never been a guarantee of safety; it has been the primary prerequisite for state-sanctioned slaughter. From the forced starvation of 150,000 civilians at the Siege of Changchun
RSS