The weather-related tragedies Taiwan has experienced in recent years have illustrated important lessons on how disaster management systems in Southeast Asian countries need to be built, APEC Climate Center (APCC) Director Chung Chin-seung said in Taipei yesterday.
Chung, who has devoted his career to environment-related policies in South Korea, gave a keynote speech at a symposium on disaster management in Taiwan, co-hosted by the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction and other institutions.
“I was surprised when I saw the numbers,” Chung said, referring to the “horrible amount of precipitation” brought to Taiwan by Typhoon Morakot last year and Megi last month
Chung said Taiwan has a “well-developed disaster management scheme” that is absent in South -Korea because his country does not experience the serious typhoons, rainfall or earthquakes that are common in Taiwan.
The APCC is hoping to work with Taiwan to help Southeast Asian countries frequently affected by similar disasters, Chung said on the sidelines of the conference.
“We [the APCC] have the advantage of predicting rainfall occurrence and rainfall estimates, and there are lots of things we can learn from Taiwan’s disaster -management system,” he said.
Asked about the five-year plan announced by the South Korean government last month, which would have the country spend US$36 billion to develop renewable energy, Chung said that the plan is targeted at achieving a goal of procuring 12 percent of South Korea’s energy from renewable sources within five years, as opposed to the current level of less than 2 percent.
“Reducing the demand for fossil fuels and using more renewable energy will be a great help to solve global warming issues,” Chung said.
A major issue that also needs to be addressed is enhancing the -capabilities of developing countries to deal with unusual weather and climate conditions, he said.
“Whether it is a poor or rich country, we all have to work together to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to protect humans from global warming by using more renewable energy,” Chung said.
During his keynote speech, Chung said that the APCC has doubled its budget for next year.
The bigger budget will be spent on increasing the number of training programs for developing APEC members, research and on expanding communication about how to utilize climate information for -developing areas.
Chung said the APCC will also focus on conducting research to improve prediction models, especially in areas such as errors and uncertainty, and expand its research to encompass longer time periods, such as a decade, for predictions.
Chung said that in the coming years, the APCC is likely to cooperate with Taiwan in many areas — collecting seasonal climate information in the region, analyzing climate variability and change, studying the impacts of climate change on tropical cyclone activities and exchanging data, especially relating to seasonal climate predictions.
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