A series of environment-themed activities are to be held — including beach clean-ups, a market selling “green” products, lectures, music performances and film showings — to mark Earth Day, which this year falls on April 22 and is centered on tree conservation.
At a news conference yesterday to promote the event, environmental groups and businesses said tree conservation and sustainable forest management are the central topics of this year’s campaign, which is using the slogan “one Earth, all life.”
Taiwan Environmental Information Center director Kao Ying-hsun (高英勛) said 15 billion trees disappear from the world every year, with an area of forest as large as 48 soccer fields is lost every minute.
Forests play a key role in efforts to limit rises in global temperatures to below 2°C and the government must conserve trees and stop importing primary forest products, Kao said.
Fu-Tien Tree Healing and Conservation Foundation director Chiu Hui-chu (邱慧珠) said National Arbor Day should be scrapped and replaced with a tree conservation day, as Arbor Day is part of the government’s misguided forestry policy that seeks to reforest an area artificially after trees have been cut down.
“Proper tree protection should take ‘treeology’ into account and treat trees in a scientific and correct way. Institutionalizing tree protection and education is also important for sustainable forest management,” Chiu said.
“Artificial forests can cause environmental problems and ifringe the rights of Aborigines to use land. Planting trees damages rainforests, which are able to recover without human intervention,” Malaysian human rights and environmental activist Wong Meng-chuo (?孟祚) said.
Taiwan has become the second-largest importer of timber from Sarawak, Malaysia, where commercial and illegal logging have reduced Malaysia’s tropical forests at the fastest rate in the world, Wong said.
A 2006 WWF report identified Taiwan as an importer of illegal timber, most of which was sourced from Asia — including Malaysia, Wong said.
More than 20 percent of Taiwan’s timber is imported from Malaysia, Citizens of the Earth executive director Lee Ken-cheng (李根政) said, urging legislators to ban imports of illegal timber.
The groups called on the public to use wood and paper products that are certified eco-friendly and to buy fewer plastic products.
An environmental fair is be held in Taipei on April 16 and April 17, while beach clean-ups are to be held at Guoshengpu (國聖埔) in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) in May and June.
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
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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