President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions to 2005 levels by 2020 is achievable.
“Taiwan reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 4.4 percent in 2008 and cut emissions by 5 percent last year,” Ma said. “From this trend, we can see that not only can we return to 2008 levels by 2020, we can even go beyond 2005 levels.”
Ma was invited to address the opening ceremony of a forum on adapting agricultural policies to climate change hosted by the Council of Agriculture (COA).
Although the economic output generated by agricultural products are relatively small compared with other industries, it affects many people, he said.
“The development of agriculture is closely related to the preservation of the ecosystem, which is irreplaceable,” Ma said.
He said the nation had not responded quickly enough to the challenges brought by climate change. The nation, he said, was devastated by several typhoons in the past year, including Typhoon Morakot in August. The disasters also affected the agricultural sector.
“I am glad the COA is proposing strategies and policy changes to address the challenges,” Ma said.
In a statement last night, the council said the forum had delivered 43 strategies and 208 execution plans. Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said at the closing ceremony that the final results represented the collective wisdom of people in industry, academia and the government.
Meanwhile, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) and representatives of the city’s industrial sector yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding to cut carbon emissions.
Chen and the representatives vowed to follow the Bonn Declaration signed by participants of the UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development in Bonn last year.
Chen told a press conference that she has been dedicated to protecting human rights since she was young, but most of her work focused on political issues.
However, after the nation was traumatized by the flood after days of torrential rain brought by Typhoon Morakot on Aug. 8 last year, she came to realize the importance of “environmental human rights.”
“Environmental change is gradually affecting our survival. We should all take the reduction of carbon emissions seriously,” she said.
Chen said she expected enterprises in the city to support the city government’s goal of cutting emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and developing “green industries.”
She said the city would also continue to fight for the privilege of having the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) establish its Asian chapter in Kaohsiung.
Director of the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau Lee Mu-sheng (李穆生) led a delegation to the ICLEI’s Resilient Cities 2010, the first international forum on urban resilience and adaptation to climate change, held in Bonn, Germany, under the name of “Kaohsiung City, Taiwan” late last month.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods