Media reports about natural disasters were ranked top among the nation’s most important environmental news last year, an online poll by the non-profit Taiwan Environmental Info Association (TEIA) said yesterday.
In 2008 voters ranked reports on the construction of the controversial Suhua Freeway (蘇花高速公路) as the most important.
TEIA secretary-general Chen Rui-bin (陳瑞賓) said the findings showed the public was concerned about cases of over-development on mountain slopes that led to dangerous landslides during Typhoon Morakot in August.
He added that the lack of a national development plan by government authorities coupled with poor water management were also factors.
“Natural disasters have become a problem we simply cannot afford to ignore, especially with increasing signs of climate change that can be seen worldwide,” Chen said. “The government’s initiatives simply have not kept up with the scope of our environmental problems.”
The results came from a 10-day online poll held on the organization’s Web site that recorded more than 3,900 votes.
Concerns over polluted agricultural goods sparked by cases of chemical contamination in November and food safety worries were second and third respectively.
The organization also released a study on the number of environmental news articles published over the previous decade.
According to the findings, 83 percent of the articles were about issues that had a negative impact on the environment, 4 percent were neutral and 13 percent positive.
Chen Li-shu (陳麗淑), a researcher at the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology, said the disappointing findings show that the government has been promoting a set of contradictory policies that emphasized “conservation on one hand and rampant development on the other.”
“It’s disheartening to see the government unable to focus on one particular set of policies that will help our environment,” she said.
Another environmental activist said that the lack of initiatives showed that the public would have to work together to reduce emissions and called for more civic participation.
“The public needs to understand our nation’s extreme challenges … Our situation is not much better than Tuvalu or Nauru,” said Wang Chun-hsiu (王俊秀), a professor at National Tsing Hua University, in reference to the two island nations in danger of being engulfed because of rising sea levels. “In a couple of decades, the entire Taipei basin could be sitting under water.”
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