With floods brought by Tropical Storm Mindulle sweeping away many facilities which aimed at preventing such flooding, the safety of river ecotechnology is once again being questioned.
Over the past few days, experts and academics have expressed their opinions in favor of or against ecotechnology, but this is little known in the media.
It seems difficult to come to a conclusion about which opinions are correct and which are not.
The current thinking on flood prevention engineering can be divided into two categories.
The first category is directed by the Cabinet's Public Construction Commission and it unites domestic ecological and landscaping experts and academic institutions in the promotion of ecotechnology.
The other category consists of civil and hydraulics technicians and traditional hydraulics engineers. Throughout their training, these people have have become well-versed in the "security first" concept.
They use traditional building techniques, and have problems identifying with the practitioners of ecotechnology.
These engineers come under pressure to accept responsibility when flood prevention fails, but they believe the behavior of rivers is ultimately not their responsibility.
Because many engineers do not obtain evidence by exploring river morphology, hydrology and other factors, their suspicious attitudes toward ecotechnology are unfounded.
What's more, ecotechnology in river management is
often rigid in its application
and damages river biology
without exploiting the river's
advantages.
Unless a fundamental solution to this problem can be found, it will be difficult to build a consensus. In the following, I will list the many misconceptions of ecotechnology.
First is the biased approach among engineers.
Ecotechnology is not, in fact, another word for using more vegetation, paving river banks with stone or doing away with concrete.
Engineers in general are of the opinion that ecotechnology is insufficient when it comes to preventing floods, and although advanced countries repeatedly advocate the application of ecotechnology to revive the ecology in rivers and base this advocacy on evidence, engineering agencies contend that river and hydrological conditions are different, and there is simply no way examples from other countries can be applied domestically. Not every river in Taiwan experiences great floods and embankments are often unnecessary.
If needed, however, embankments don't necessarily have to be made of rigid concrete.
The reason river embankments are destroyed by flood waters may be because those sections are located in dangerous areas, or it could also be related to excessive human exploitation of the environment.
What's more, concrete also has its limitations when used for embankments. Concrete easily breaks when flood waters flow directly at them.
Hydraulics engineers in other countries do not think concrete is a a cure-all for flooding.
They will apply different kinds of hydraulics and hydrological analysis to find ways of reducing, or completely eliminating, the use of concrete in flood prevention projects. Nor do they believe that ecotechnology is an inferior form of flood prevention.
What we should review what is method is appropriate based on the conditions in a given area. In places unsuitable for the application of ecotechnology, a combination of it and more traditional methods should be employed.
Second, opposition from residents along rivers.
Who suffers when typhoons and floods occur?
This is the question most often raised when residents along rivers voice opposition to ecotechnology projects.
Although they can't be blamed for their superstitious belief in concrete embankments, this attitude is wrong because it still sees the application of ecotechnology in flood prevention projects as insufficient for flood prevention.
Ecological protection is a long-term project that aims at ensuring sustainable coexistence of all living things with our species.
The goal is to to persuade people into believing in sustaining the natural ecology of rivers and the land and that its resources belong to all of us.
Having said that, it should be noted that the environment must be protected by everyone.
Third is the belief that ecotechnology is difficult to sustain.
The spirit of ecotechnology is to take advantage of already existing local material and tree varieties to bring back flora and fauna that were originally part of the local ecosystem.
This does not require a lot of time and money. In the long term, however, routine maintenance is still required, just as it is necessary to allocate a maintenance budget for concrete projects. But we must face reality.
There is no such thing as a superior, maintenance-free river environment -- unless, of course, people decide to stop living in close proximity to rivers.
Fourth is the misunderstanding that ecotechnology is only a matter of improving river banks.
In addition to improving and beautifying the original river banks, the most important function of ecotechnology is the ability to build functional biological systems, including ponds, lakes, rapids or brooks and so on, where water plants and animals, insects and birds can find living and breeding space.
Research in this area is, however, very limited, and this limitation had led to the misguided notion that ecotechnology is all about greening measures and the replacement of concrete embankments with stone or earth and so on.
Such ideas have turned many ecotechnology projects into mere landscaping.
Although there have been positive developments, there is still a long way to go from discussion to action if we are to implement ecotechnology effectively.
In addition to having hopes for the reconstruction of rivers, the public, media and legal circles also have to maintain some degree of tolerance for this method, so that hasty or misguided lawsuits are not brought against hydraulics engineers after a flood disaster.
This situation would place restraints on engineers, who would then be reluctant to explore new flood prevention ideas and methods.
Wang Yung-chen is a senior engineer with the river management office in the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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