President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) stressed yesterday that Taiwan has carried out strategies to implement the conservation of biological diversity, including expanding the total area of biological protection zones and nominating this year as "the year for conservation of biological diversity" (生物多樣性保育年).
While delivering a speech at the International Symposium on Global Biological Diversity 2000 (
According to statistics from the Council of Agriculture (COA), the current total area covered by reserves and national parks is approximately 687,451 hectares.
"Last June, while reporting to the National Assembly, I brought up the idea of establishing the `central mountain range conservation axis' [a green corridor stretching more than 300km from north to south along the length of Taiwan]," Lee said.
Lee added that the year 2000 would be a milestone for Taiwan's conservation work because several important strategies would be implemented, based on conservation concepts ideas from "the year for conservation of biological diversity."
It was the first Taiwan-sponsored international symposium on the subject. Influential delegates from the international community include Elizabeth Dowdeswell, former Executive Director of the UN Environment Program, and Robert Jenkin, Chairman of the Animal Committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
In Jenkin's report on the efficacy of conservation strategies in the twentieth century, he pointed out that the last three decades have been characterized by a proliferation of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs).
"At the international level, there is a need for much greater synergy between the various MEAs to avoid, as much as possible, unnecessary duplication, or, worse still, conflicting policies," Jenkin said at the conference.
He argued that no single strategy, applied universally, would succeed in solving all the resource conservation problems.
"The cultural diversity of the international community deserves to be conserved as much as biological diversity. Respect and understanding of this cultural diversity is essential to achieving sustainable solutions to resource use and conservation problems," Jenkin said.
At the national level, he said, effective conservation of biological diversity would be enhanced if government agencies took a more flexible approach.
Echoing Jenkin, COA officials said that Taiwan's conservation efforts over the last four decades had included the establishment of nature reserves, wildlife refuges, important wildlife areas, and six national parks.
"Although Taiwan is presently not a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), it still should be responsible for conserving the biological diversity of its local environment and maintaining the sustainable use of such resources," Chen Hsi-chou (陳溪洲), director of the COA's Forestry Department said at the symposium yesterday.
Chen said that Taiwan had considered the CBD and related issues and was currently drafting a "national report on biological diversity in Taiwan."
Although Taiwan is relatively small, scientists have discovered that the island is extremely biologically diverse. Researchers estimated that more than 150,000 different species, or 1.5 percent of the world's total species, inhabit the island. Of these species, approximately 30 percent are endemic.
But Taiwan's high population density and pressure from human development are taking their toll, according to biologists.
This, they say, is all the more reason to act swiftly to preserve biodiversity.
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