Despite being excluded from the UN, Taiwan yesterday made its voice heard on the initiatives to tackle global warming as 108 Taiwanese citizens participated in a simultaneous global democratic deliberation on the issue.
World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) launched the campaign with the intention of allowing citizens around the world to define and communicate their positions on issues central to the UN climate change negotiations (COP15) that will take place in Copenhagen in December.
The campaign called for about 100 ordinary people, chosen to represent their region's demographic diversity, to gather at a meeting yesterday to address an identical set of questions, vote on questions, as well as propose and prioritize action recommendations. An estimated 5,000 people around the world joined the deliberations yesterday on four themes: climate change and its consequences; the long-term goal and urgency of a new climate deal; dealing with greenhouse emissions; and the economy of technology and adaptation.
In Taiwan, the 108 citizens were chosen randomly from more than 700 people who registered for the event, with their ages ranging between 18 and 73 and coming from different backgrounds in terms of region and ethnicity.
Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy, one of the co-hosts of the WWViews meeting in Taiwan, reported its results on WWViews' Web site, where the outcome from 45 deliberations in 38 countries are also available.
After the eight-hour deliberation, the three most important issues selected by the 108 citizens were: adopting a vegetarian diet as an effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emission; establishing a fair and feasible new climate deal under which developed countries set higher targets for emission reduction than developing countries; and setting a global convention on climate change.
About 89 percent of the Taiwanese participants considered it “very urgent” to reach a global deal on climate change, saying it should be done at the COP 15 conference.
On the alternative energy issue, 45 percent of the participants said that governments of all countries should raise the price of fuel energy as a means to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and encourage the development of new energy.
Institute president Eugene Chien (簡又新) said the WWWViews project was held to let policymakers know that people are “aware of” the climate change issue, “support” them in tackling the problem and to “lobby” and even “pressure” politicians to take action.
“We are now facing a serious global climate crisis. Everyone knows we have to deal with the problem, but when it comes to initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, every country is only concerned about the impact of its own national interests and hopes others would do more,” Chien said.
Earlier this year, the government set its carbon emissions reduction target, saying it aimed to lower emissions from 2016-2020 to 2008 levels and further reduce them to 2000 levels by 2025.
Addressing the event before the deliberation, Environmental Protection Administration Deputy Minister Chang Tzi-chin (張子敬) said the exclusion of Taiwan from international climate agreements had posted difficulties for the country on emission reduction.
“As Taiwan is not a signatory to the international agreements, we cannot join the reduction mechanism such as CT [cap-and-trade], CCS [capture and storage] and the like. We are on our own,” Chang said.
Lin Kuo-ming (林國明), an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, said Taiwan was invited by Denmark to be one of the seven countries jointly initiating the WWViews projects in view of the country's previous dedicated pursuit of deliberative democracy.
The initiators also included Britain, Finland, Norway, Austria and Belgium, Lin said.
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