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Scientists call for more funds for ocean sciences

Senior scientists and administrators gathered yesterday at the National Science Council's (NSC) Taipei headquarters to celebrate the National Center for Ocean Research's (NCOR) accomplishments over the past decade as well as to call for more public funds to support and expand the center's work.

NCOR is a decentralized program with offices in three major universities and is overseen by the NSC.

The branch offices are due to be consolidated In March into a single entity, overseen by the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL). Accompanying the transition will be a substantial increase in NSC funding, which will remain its sponsor.

The center's budget will be raised from NT$350 million (US$10.79 million) last year to NT$600 million. The site of the new center is yet to be determined, the project having failed to attract enough bids from contractors.

"It doesn't matter to us how the NCOR is organized," said National Sun Yat-sen University assistant researcher Hsu Chia-wei (許家維), who has worked on data from a South China Sea time-series station monitoring ocean carbon dioxide levels off the coast of Taiwan for more than two years. "As long as our research is not affected."

Plans to build a new research vessel have also been delayed by the failure to attract enough bids.

"Since the budget for the vessel was approved, several things have happened," NARL chairman Robert Lai (賴義雄) said. "The shipping industry has boomed and prices of metals have also gone up. We either have to increase the budget for the vessel or scale down our requirements, otherwise no shipbuilding company will be interested."

Ocean sciences have suffered from chronic underinvestment in this country, he said.

"We are a small island surrounded by the rich resources of the ocean, but our investment in oceanographic research is just a scant fraction of what other countries are spending. As a result we are leaving those resources untapped," Lai said. "South Korea is spending NT$4.3 billion a year on the Korea Oceanographic Data Center and the Japanese are spending even more."

NSC Deputy Minister Yang Hung-duen (楊弘敦) disagreed.

"If you only look at comparable research, the South Koreans spend about twice as much as we do," Yang said.
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