Taiwan unveiled the Pan-Pacific Adaptation on Climate Change (PPACC), an initiative aimed at helping the region deal with the effects of climate change, in Paris on Sunday.
Several nations in the region are facing similar challenges as a result of climate change and Taiwan has the technology to deal with those issues, Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Wei Kuo-yen (魏國彥) said at the launch.
The Asia-Pacific region needs the PPACC to help it prepare for climate change, Wei said.
The PPACC is to cooperate with the Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, the EPA said.
Taiwan’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Management Office has also signed a letter of intent with the CCI’s Climate CoLab on future cooperation, it said.
CCI director Thomas Malone said at the launch that Climate CoLab’s partnership with the EPA is its first in the Asia-Pacific region, which is at high risk from the effects of climate change because of its dense population.
The EPA said its office would work with Climate CoLab, which brings together people from around the world to work on climate change issues, to hold a series of events and contests to solicit ideas from the public.
Wei is in Paris for the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to which Taiwan is not a party.
He is the first Taiwanese minister to take part in a UN climate change summit and is scheduled to hold bilateral talks with environmental protection officials from other nations during his visit.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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