Taiwan was ranked 24th among 133 nations in a recent environmental study, but that does not mean that the nation is free from environmental damage caused by industrialization and economic development, officials and researchers said.
The World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2006 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) focuses on countries' environmental performance within the context of sustainability. The EPI provides a basis for examining the relationship between economic competitiveness and environmental protection, according to a research team from the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University.
The result shows that the top-ranking EPI countries emerge as among the most productive and competitive in the world. Taiwan beat not only the US, but also countries such as South Korea.
For the just-reshuffled Cabinet, the EPI report could offer more practical policy guidelines than President Chen Shui-bian's (
According to Research, Development and Evaluation Committee Minister Yeh Jiunn-rong (
Yeh, who is also the executive-general of the National Council for Sustainable Development, said that the EPI report honestly reflects Taiwan's problems, such as overfishing, poorly-designed agricultural subsidies and low use of renewable energy.
"Based on the EPI report, the council will suggest to Premier Su Tseng-chang (
The EPI identifies performance targets and measures how close each country comes to these goals. It ranks surveyed countries on 16 indicators tracked in six policy categories, including environmental health, air quality, water resources, biodiversity and habitat, productive natural resources and sustainable energy.
Yeh said that the evaluation system is more objective than the WEF's Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), which last year placed Taiwan at the very bottom of 146 surveyed nations.
This indicator put Taiwan only slightly ahead of North Korea, but behind such countries as Iraq and Turkmenistan.
Yeh explained that the EPI provides "peer group" rankings for each country showing how its performance stacks up against others facing similar environmental challenges and Taiwan participated in the process to ensure the accuracy of raw data requested by the research team.
Yeh said that the ESI research team used inappropriately collected raw data regarding Taiwan's environment, and then gained a distorted face of the country. He did not elaborate.
Yang Yu-ling (楊毓齡), a senior researcher for the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), who participated in the meetings at Yale University last October, said that foreign researchers had only a vague image of Taiwan and that raw data had often been left out by research organizations affiliated with the UN.
"Sometimes foreign researchers imagine that the environment management in Taiwan is similar to that in developing countries in East Europe," she said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang To-far (
In terms of economics, Wang said, the leading monitor of the competitive condition of economies worldwide reflects the nations' economic vigor.
In the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report 2005-2006, which assesses 117 economies, Taiwan ranks fifth.
Wang said that Taiwan has to be very careful when shaping economic policy and guiding investment decisions based on the GCI assessment.
"How can the government further ensure Taiwan's competitiveness after reading the latest EPI report? Poorly-designed fishing policies fail to solve problems caused by illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The international punishment from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) is a good example," Wang said.
Last November, ICCAT voted to cut Taiwan's catch quota for Atlantic big-eye tuna by 70 percent.
Similarly, Wang said, Taiwan has to speed up promotion of renewable energy, since the depletion of fossil fuels is a global problem.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the