Ecological conservationists and geological experts yesterday urged the government to establish a legal framework to protect the country's landscape.
Panelists at a discussion held by the Consumers' Foundation in Taipei yesterday discussed how the law could be used to prevent a repeat of several recent cases in which construction was said to have impaired the landscape in national parks.
Early this month, the superintendent of the Taroko National Park Headquarters, Yeh Shih-wen (
On Tuesday, legislators accused the Yangmingshan National Park's management of destroying the mountain's environment by allowing the building of cement constructions near hot springs for the convenience of tourists.
Lin Jiun-chuan (林俊全), a National Taiwan University geography professor, questioned the Cabinet's decision to reassign Yeh, saying he had an excellent reputation in his field.
"Actually, Taiwan's precious landscapes have been sacrificed for decades because of unsound regulations," Lin said.
Yu Ming-kuo (游明國), chairman of the Consumers' Foundation, said that the Taroko case was only the tip of the iceberg and that other national parks were suffering similar problems.
Yu, who had recently returned from a trip to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, said that mobile-phone operators in the Baltic countries frequently shared sites for their antennas and often used the same masts.
"But in Taiwan, our national parks headquarters are still fighting against mobile-phone operators two decades after they were established because of the lack of regulations," Yu said.
In addition to construction in national parks, Yu said, all public construction should be comprehensively evaluated before works starts.
"The statute regarding city-scapes (
Public Construction Commission (PCC) Vice Chairman Kuo Ching-chiang (郭清江) said he was aware that government agencies built unnecessary constructions to use up their budgets, causing irreversible damage to fragile ecological systems.
Kuo gave as an example the 173km-long National Route 11, which connects Hualien and Taitung counties. He said that widening the route was unnecessary because it was rarely used.
Beginning last year, Kuo said, any development costing more than NT$50 million needed to be reviewed by the PCC when it was 30 percent complete. He said the government was promoting nature-friendly engineering to minimize the impact development has on the countryside.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching