Taiwan was ranked 24th among 133 nations in a recent environmental study, but that does not mean that the nation is free from environmental damage caused by industrialization and economic development, officials and researchers said.
The World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2006 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) focuses on countries' environmental performance within the context of sustainability. The EPI provides a basis for examining the relationship between economic competitiveness and environmental protection, according to a research team from the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University.
The result shows that the top-ranking EPI countries emerge as among the most productive and competitive in the world. Taiwan beat not only the US, but also countries such as South Korea.
For the just-reshuffled Cabinet, the EPI report could offer more practical policy guidelines than President Chen Shui-bian's (
According to Research, Development and Evaluation Committee Minister Yeh Jiunn-rong (
Yeh, who is also the executive-general of the National Council for Sustainable Development, said that the EPI report honestly reflects Taiwan's problems, such as overfishing, poorly-designed agricultural subsidies and low use of renewable energy.
"Based on the EPI report, the council will suggest to Premier Su Tseng-chang (
The EPI identifies performance targets and measures how close each country comes to these goals. It ranks surveyed countries on 16 indicators tracked in six policy categories, including environmental health, air quality, water resources, biodiversity and habitat, productive natural resources and sustainable energy.
Yeh said that the evaluation system is more objective than the WEF's Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), which last year placed Taiwan at the very bottom of 146 surveyed nations.
This indicator put Taiwan only slightly ahead of North Korea, but behind such countries as Iraq and Turkmenistan.
Yeh explained that the EPI provides "peer group" rankings for each country showing how its performance stacks up against others facing similar environmental challenges and Taiwan participated in the process to ensure the accuracy of raw data requested by the research team.
Yeh said that the ESI research team used inappropriately collected raw data regarding Taiwan's environment, and then gained a distorted face of the country. He did not elaborate.
Yang Yu-ling (楊毓齡), a senior researcher for the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), who participated in the meetings at Yale University last October, said that foreign researchers had only a vague image of Taiwan and that raw data had often been left out by research organizations affiliated with the UN.
"Sometimes foreign researchers imagine that the environment management in Taiwan is similar to that in developing countries in East Europe," she said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang To-far (
In terms of economics, Wang said, the leading monitor of the competitive condition of economies worldwide reflects the nations' economic vigor.
In the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report 2005-2006, which assesses 117 economies, Taiwan ranks fifth.
Wang said that Taiwan has to be very careful when shaping economic policy and guiding investment decisions based on the GCI assessment.
"How can the government further ensure Taiwan's competitiveness after reading the latest EPI report? Poorly-designed fishing policies fail to solve problems caused by illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The international punishment from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) is a good example," Wang said.
Last November, ICCAT voted to cut Taiwan's catch quota for Atlantic big-eye tuna by 70 percent.
Similarly, Wang said, Taiwan has to speed up promotion of renewable energy, since the depletion of fossil fuels is a global problem.
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