Taiwan should follow Japan’s lead by encouraging enterprises to develop international decarbonization projects rather than solely focusing on “reducing our own carbon emissions,” an expert in carbon trading said on Monday.
Lee Chien-ming (李堅明), a professor in National Taipei University’s Institute of Natural Resource Management who recently returned from the UN’s COP28 summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, made the comments in a speech at an event hosted by the Taipei-based Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce.
The government’s mentality of concentrating on “our own backyard by only caring about cutting our own carbon emissions” needs to change, Lee said, adding that Taiwan is reluctant to allow large emitters to use international carbon credits to offset statutory obligations.
The Climate Change Response Act (氣候變遷因應法) requires enterprises that emit more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent per year to pay carbon fees — starting in 2025 — based on measurements from the year before, he said.
However, Taiwan eschews global cooperation on decarbonization, which is “contrary to what the world is aiming at,” he said.
Although the Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange (TCX) began trading international carbon credits yesterday, the Ministry of Environment has said that enterprises in Taiwan would not be allowed to use them to offset the 2025 fees, Lee said.
Reasons for the restriction have been given.
TCX said it was because subsidiary regulations on carbon fees have not yet been announced, Chinese-language media reported last week, while Climate Change Administration director-general Tsai Ling-yi (蔡玲儀) said it was because no precedent for using international carbon credits to offset domestic carbon levies has been set in other countries that also have carbon pricing.
Despite this, the government should encourage private enterprises to arrange projects with entities in other countries that would allow carbon credits earned outside Taiwan to partly meet domestic obligations, Lee said.
The nation’s emissions reduction targets, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), would be enhanced if Taiwan is more open to this kind of international cooperation, he added.
The NDCs, which were announced last year by the National Development Council, include a 24 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 compared with the baseline year of 2005, a goal Lee said could be much improved on if Japan’s example is followed.
Japan has been operating a “joint crediting mechanism” with government backing and subsidies since 2013, and has been involved in 223 projects with 27 countries, he said.
Japan is following Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which allows countries to voluntarily cooperate to achieve their emission reduction targets or NDCs, he said.
Japan “has a mid-term target of 46 percent reduction by 2030 compared with 2013, much of which is probably planned to be from the joint crediting mechanism,” Lee said, adding that Taipei could launch its own “Taiwan joint crediting mechanism.”
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