The National Science Council (NSC) yesterday released an ambitious plan to promote biological diversity research in Taiwan in a bid to build a complete database essential for bio-technology development.
Ecologists say, however, that the difficulty they now face is the lack of a comprehensive national project to support biodiversity research.
Top priorities
Major planks of the NSC plan released yesterday include establishing a biodiversity curriculum, enhancing international cooperation and integrating biodiversity research outcomes.
"The NSC has strengthened bio-tech related research and development, which was a relatively weak field in scientific research in Taiwan," said Huang Wen-hsiung (黃文雄), NSC Vice Chairman, yesterday.
In the future, Huang said, the council would strongly support long-term and integrative research projects pertaining to biodiversity.
"Medicine, genetic research and agricultural biology will be our main focuses," Huang said.
NSC officials said that the purpose of biodiversity research was to ease growing stress faced by the environment and ecological system in Taiwan. Evidence of this stress includes a sharp decline in fishery production, the sinking of stratum, more acid rain, and mudflows resulting from mountain exploitation, among others.
Biodiversity is the term given to the variety of life on earth and the natural patterns it forms. This diversity covers the wide variety of plants, animals and microorganisms.
According to the UN, so far about 1.75 million species have been identified, mostly small creatures such as insects. Scientists think that there are actually about 13 million species.
Concerned that biological diversity is being significantly reduced by human activities, the UN passed the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, which has been signed by 176 countries who have carried out important parts of the conven-tion, including enhancing biodiversity research.
In Taiwan, an island covered by sub-tropical and tropical ecological systems, it is estimated that there are about 150,000 species, a fourth of which are found only here.
"However, Taiwan lacks a comprehensive national project to draw more manpower and money into the ecological research field," said Lin Yao-sung (
First things first
Lin said that Taiwan had not even completed its own national report on biodiversity.
"The idea of producing such a national report had been halted since the new government took the helm," said Lin, adding that politicians rarely considered the importance of ecological research, despite the fact it would bring great economic benefits to Taiwan.
Lin said that many pharmaceutical companies in other countries had benefited from using rare genes gathered in rainforests as components of drugs.
Lin said that Taiwan has fallen behind other countries in biodiversity research and now the government's neglect was making the future of the research gloomy.
He said that ecologists had also suggested the government upgrade the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute (TESRI, 台灣特有生物中心), presently under the Council of Agriculture, into a national institution in charge of carrying out a complete survey of species in Taiwan.
"If we don't have a primary survey on species, how can we be competitve?" Lin said.
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