Taichung City Councilor Chang Yao-chung (張耀中) yesterday challenged Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung’s (林佳龍) plan to plant 1 million trees in the special municipality by 2022, saying it would require about 800 hectares of land and referring to a failed attempt by the state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) at a similar project in New Taipei City.
Chang, of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), yesterday said at a city council session that Lin’s plan faces the challenges of budget, space, time and staffing, and that the proposal made in March lacks solid content to demonstrate its viability.
He said Taipower has not made any progress on its tree-planting program — offered in 2009 as ecological compensation for the expansion of its Linkou District (林口) coal-fired power plant — due to difficulties in identifying available space.
A Taipower assessment showed that 800 hectares of land would be needed for the trees, Chang said.
The Kaohsiung City Government in 2012 also proposed planting 1 million trees and planted 2,000 this year on 1.5 hectares of land, suggesting that both municipalities would require at least 750 hectares, Chang added.
Experts he consulted said that 1 million average “road trees” cost about NT$3 billion (US$97.7 million), Chang said.
He asked how the mayor would find the space and money.
In response, Taichung Deputy Mayor Lin Ling-san (林陵三) said the municipal government is taking inventory of available space for the project, including public space, rezoned urban areas, slopes and parks.
The city plans to grow 173 hectares of trees before Lin’s term expires in 2018, he said.
Taichung Construction Bureau Director Huang Yu-lin (黃玉霖) said the special municipality seeks to set aside space in seized land and rezoned urban areas to boost greenery and increase the number of tree-lined avenues.
The Taichung City Government plans to review land under development, such as the Jade Eco Park (清翠園), which covers 67 hectares, as well as boost the number of plants in existing green spaces, he said.
Huang said that his bureau would negotiate a consensus with the Taichung Agriculture Bureau to implement a proposed “public cemetery gardens” special project, as public cemeteries are ideal locations for forestation.
He said sourcing young trees does not always require government spending, adding that the bureau would explore the possibility of planting trees on private land that it leases.
The city plans to allocate an overall budget of NT$2.4 billion to boost vegetation until 2018, Huang said.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: