A succession of disasters of natural and human origin over the course of last year have hit Taiwan hard. From earthquakes and extreme weather events to public security incidents, disasters became a part of everyday life.
Earthquakes give immediate rise to damage reports and safety checks across social media, demonstrating the maturity of civic mobilization and digital mutual aid practices. These same incidents also expose the precarity of aging buildings, infrastructure and emergency response systems. Disasters have become re-emerging mirrors that reflect Taiwan’s long-accumulated governance problems yet to be fully confronted.
Broadly, Taiwan’s capacity to respond to disasters has certainly improved. Most people now possess basic knowledge of how to evacuate or take shelter in an earthquake, and the reaction times of local governments and fire services are much faster than in the past. However, behind this seemingly well-practiced response there is another hidden danger: the normalization of risk.
As disasters become more frequent, society can slip into a state of diminished alertness, quickly returning to normal so long as there are not high casualties. This might be helpful for the stabilization of collective social psychology, but it could also reduce pressure for structural reforms, and allow the long-term investments required for reforming disaster prevention and resilience capacity to be repeatedly postponed.
Public safety incidents further highlight the problem of fragmented governance. Whether in earthquake safety codes, the renewal of aging housing stock, safety of transportation infrastructure or risk management in large public spaces, responsibility is often spread across multiple authorities, with divided mandates and inconsistent standards. This mode of governance seems to only respond after each disaster when the same “old” problems must be revisited, and continually struggles to advance genuine progress.
From a longer-term perspective, climate change and earthquake risks are compounding to amplify Taiwan’s disaster challenges. Extreme weather is altering rainfall patterns, increasing the risks of landslides and flooding that can also be set off by unpredictable seismic events, demanding a high degree of societal resilience. The issue is that this resilience comes not just from emergency response efficiency, but everyday investment choices. If disaster response budgets are treated as costs rather than essential public investments, and political calculations and short-term interests continue to constrain seismic retrofitting and urban renewal, the costs of future disasters would only lead to even heftier bills.
The frequent disasters of the past year have provided an opportunity to rethink our priorities of governance. Genuine disaster prevention should not stop at public awareness campaigns and drills, but be executed through institutional design and smart resource allocation. Accelerating the reinforcement of aging buildings, integrating cross-agency public safety governance and establishing more transparent risk-information mechanisms are tasks that can no longer be deferred.
The fallout from disasters are never isolated events; they are the cumulative result of a series of choices. We must honestly confront a simple question: Before the next disaster arrives, have we truly made different choices?
Roger Lo is a freelancer.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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