President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions to 2005 levels by 2020 is achievable.
“Taiwan reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 4.4 percent in 2008 and cut emissions by 5 percent last year,” Ma said. “From this trend, we can see that not only can we return to 2008 levels by 2020, we can even go beyond 2005 levels.”
Ma was invited to address the opening ceremony of a forum on adapting agricultural policies to climate change hosted by the Council of Agriculture (COA).
Although the economic output generated by agricultural products are relatively small compared with other industries, it affects many people, he said.
“The development of agriculture is closely related to the preservation of the ecosystem, which is irreplaceable,” Ma said.
He said the nation had not responded quickly enough to the challenges brought by climate change. The nation, he said, was devastated by several typhoons in the past year, including Typhoon Morakot in August. The disasters also affected the agricultural sector.
“I am glad the COA is proposing strategies and policy changes to address the challenges,” Ma said.
In a statement last night, the council said the forum had delivered 43 strategies and 208 execution plans. Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said at the closing ceremony that the final results represented the collective wisdom of people in industry, academia and the government.
Meanwhile, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) and representatives of the city’s industrial sector yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding to cut carbon emissions.
Chen and the representatives vowed to follow the Bonn Declaration signed by participants of the UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development in Bonn last year.
Chen told a press conference that she has been dedicated to protecting human rights since she was young, but most of her work focused on political issues.
However, after the nation was traumatized by the flood after days of torrential rain brought by Typhoon Morakot on Aug. 8 last year, she came to realize the importance of “environmental human rights.”
“Environmental change is gradually affecting our survival. We should all take the reduction of carbon emissions seriously,” she said.
Chen said she expected enterprises in the city to support the city government’s goal of cutting emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and developing “green industries.”
She said the city would also continue to fight for the privilege of having the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) establish its Asian chapter in Kaohsiung.
Director of the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau Lee Mu-sheng (李穆生) led a delegation to the ICLEI’s Resilient Cities 2010, the first international forum on urban resilience and adaptation to climate change, held in Bonn, Germany, under the name of “Kaohsiung City, Taiwan” late last month.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
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