Addressing some of the environmental challenges Taiwan will face in the next decade, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said yesterday that a future DPP government would focus on long-term solutions rather than short-term fixes.
Environmental activists, experts and DPP officials met yesterday in the second of a series of forums titled “Taiwan’s unavoidable future challenges” designed to help the party draw up its “10 Year Political Master Plan.”
Officials hope that the political agenda will show the party’s supporters it is ready to govern again.
Issues covered at the forum included methods to reduce Taiwan’s dependence on external energy sources, protecting water resources and the effects that global warming will have on the country.
“We are looking for ways Taiwan can survive in a world that is running out of resources,” National Taiwan University professor Wu Tsung-tsong (吳政忠) said. “Dealing with these problems will require ambitious, far-reaching policies.”
The latest government statistics show that more than 99 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, while annual carbon emissions are 2.5 times the world average.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), under pressure to fulfill a promise to reduce 2020 emissions to 2005 levels, has announced plans to open the nation’s fourth nuclear power plant by October next year.
Wu said that it was “almost impossible” for the government to reach its target because of a delay to the date Taiwan is expected to reach its peak energy usage — the highest amount of emissions produced — from 2015 to between 2016 and 2020.
He said nuclear energy was not the answer to the country’s future energy needs, adding that it was debatable whether nuclear power should be classified as “clean energy.”
Instead, Wu called on the government to encourage more investment in renewable energy resources.
He said that in the next two years, “the government needs cross-departmental support for a sweeping new energy policy,” and in the long-term, it needs to privatize Taiwan Power Co (台電) and create “reasonable and transparent” renewable energy prices.
Taiwan Ecological Engineering Department Foundation director and former head of Chunghwa Telecom Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) said another issue was dwindling water supplies.
“We haven’t been doing enough to preserve water supplies,” Ho said. “We treat it like a commodity that needs to be made cheaper and wasted more.”
A future DPP administration should increase the price of water, he said, citing examples such as Denmark, where water is five times more expensive than it is in Taiwan.
Efforts to resolve water supply problems in the south should also take into account Aboriginal interests, Taiwan Aboriginal Society chairman Wang Ming-huei (汪明輝) said.
He said that government proposals to build dams and riverbank developments have gone ahead despite Aboriginal concerns about the negative environmental effects. Wang said the government had botched reconstruction efforts after Typhoon Morakot because of a lack of “cultural understanding and respect.”
“Some of the developments we have seen on Aboriginal land following the typhoon include betel nut, coffee and tea plantations on mountain slopes,” Wang said. “We have not received any benefits from this, instead the environment has worsened.”
Speaking after the forum, Tsai promised to address the concerns raised, saying that the DPP viewed addressing environmental concerns as an “unavoidable responsibility.”
“Taiwan faces a great threat from global warming,” Tsai said. “The way we see it, energy and the environment ... need to be dealt with in the medium to long-term vision of the country’s development. It needs to be far reaching and include a change in our basic framework.”
Taiwanese scientists have engineered plants that can capture about 50 percent more carbon dioxide and produce more than twice as many seeds as unmodified plants, a breakthrough they hope could one day help mitigate global warming and grow more food staples such as rice. If applied to major food crops, the new system could cut carbon emissions and raise yields “without additional equipment or labor costs,” Academia Sinica researcher and lead author the study Lu Kuan-jen (呂冠箴) said. Academia Sinica president James Liao (廖俊智) said that as humans emit 9.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide compared with the 220 billion tonnes absorbed
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