A shortage of water will hit by 2030 due to a serious buildup of silt in the nation’s reservoirs, Minister of the Interior Lee Hong-yuan (李鴻源) said yesterday.
The capacity of the 50 reservoirs has decreased over the years due to severe silt buildup and by 2030 will further decrease to a degree that will hardly be able to sustain the nation’s 23 million people, Lee said. The silt buildup poses a great challenge, he said.
For instance, the amount of silt in the Shihmen Reservoir has reached 100 million tonnes, he said. If all the trucks needed to carry away the silt were lined up, they would circle the Earth seven times and the transportation costs would reach NT$100 billion (US$3.3 billion), which is not feasible, he said.
A severe flood strikes the nation every two years and a severe drought every nine years, Lee said.
In addition, Taiwan may be facing a food and energy crisis in the next 30 years, a crisis that Lee attributed to a warming planet and increasing global population, coupled with the nation’s reliance on other countries for resources.
Taiwan is a heavy consumer of energy and water and yet utilities rates are low, Lee said. A rational discussion on making rates more reasonable has not occured because of political factors, he said.
In a similarly paradoxical issue, the government has to spend a lot of money to preserve the nation’s shoreline, which has been damaged by heavy use of groundwater by the agricultural and fish farming sectors, and yet the costs of such conservation far outweigh the economic benefits, Lee said.
The nation needs to hold rational discussions on these issues and undertake smart planning to brace itself for all the challenges ahead, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching