The nation has dropped two places in the Germanwatch Climate Change Performance Index this year, because of increased electricity use and a decline in renewable power generation last year, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday, adding that the final results would not be confirmed until tomorrow.
Germanwatch announces the rankings every year, and its index for next year would be announced tomorrow, according to the environmental organization’s Web site.
The Chinese-language United Daily News yesterday reported that Germanwatch lowered the nation’s ranking from No. 54 to No. 56, only surpassing South Korea, Iran, the US and Saudi Arabia.
The report cited documentation obtained at the 24th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change taking place in Poland.
The nation’s renewable power generation declined by 2.87 percent last year, because less rainfall resulted in a 17 percent reduction in hydropower generation, the EPA said yesterday, adding that solar and wind power sources were not able to make up the shortfall despite their significant increase last year.
Due to higher temperatures in summer last year, the nation’s electricity demand increased by 2.34 percent compared with 2016, it said, adding that last year’s power use also hit a record.
The group evaluates a nation’s performance in four areas — greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy development, energy use and climate policy — but climate policy “lacks objective evaluation criteria,” which is why the nation received a lower score, the EPA said.
India is a big carbon emitter, but its climate policy score is curiously high, it added.
Evaluations on greenhouse per capita gas emissions are unfavorable for export-reliant countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, the agency said.
The EPA said it would pay close attention to the group’s publication tomorrow and continue reviewing its climate-related policy.
In last year’s report Taiwan ranked No. 54 overall and No. 40 on climate policy.
Taiwan was referred to as “Chinese Taipei” in the group’s past reports.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
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