Environmentalists urged the government yesterday to embrace sustainable environmental development when making economic policies, insisting a more coherent and integrated approach to economic and environment policy-making is needed.
At a conference sponsored by the Ecology Conservation Alliance (
"The purpose of sustainable development is for people to behave responsibly toward generations still unborn. A renewable environmental space is based on the idea that there are limits for which the earth's resources can be used. We have to preserve resources for future generations," said Lee Yung-jan (李永展), a land economics professor from National Chengchi University.
Lee said that the government should improve monitoring on local resource consumption, particularly in sectors such as material consumption, energy, water, forest and land use.
Experts said that sustainable development is a global issue. Since the Brundtland Report of 1987, they explained, cooperation between countries concerning global environmental problems would eventually change the direction of post-war international economic development.
According to the Brundtland report, "A world in which poverty and inequality are endemic will always be prone to ecological and other crises. Sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life."
"We have to take the population issue seriously. Fifty years from now, the population in Taiwan will probably exceed 30 million. If we keep relying on the petrochemical industry, which consumes mineral energy and also produces a great deal of carbon monoxide, what will the island be like?" said Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (
"While everyone in Taiwan is distressed over air and water pollution, we are facing other environmental problems such as deforestation caused by planting tea trees on mountain slopes. I agree with environmental experts that existing policies should be revised to include the notion of sustainable development," Lee said.
Foreign environmentalists echoed this opinion, stressing an immediate necessity for the government was to process a tax revolution known as "tax shifting" -- also called "green tax reform" or "ecological taxing" -- that could transform economic, social and environmental dynamics.
The "green" tax system essentially levies a tax on environmental consumption as a mechanism to discourage environmentally destructive production by industries.
Jeffrey Smith, an NGO activist from the US, said yesterday that the goal is to revise the fundamental purpose of taxes.
According to Friends of the Earth, a global environmental protection advocacy organization, instead of large sums of revenue taken from people and commerce, tax shifting enhances the quality of the environment, reduces governmental demands and expenditures, while at the same time improves social welfare before the money has even been spent on government programs.
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