Culture and society – Taiwan Insight

Community energy: A way out of energy transition

20 July 2020 Editor

Written by Natalie Wong. The Taiwanese Government further promoted energy transition, encouraged citizen participation in energy policy, and also subsidised community solar panel installation in 2013. Later, in 2018, the DPP Government implemented a White Paper for Energy Transition, with the notion of community energy being highlighted. It concluded that during the energy transition, the roles of social force should not be neglected. Consisting of 18 ENGOs and community colleges, these civil society organisations became allies for promoting the 2015 energy transition.

Climate change and the traditional knowledge of indigenous people: what can we learn?

15 July 2020 Editor

Written by Tzu-Ming Liu. Due to Taiwan’s geographical location and geological properties, the country is particularly at risk of the impact of climate change. Some apparent phenomena of climate change are that the frequencies of extreme precipitation events. Furthermore, extreme typhoon intensity is increasing. These phenomena have caused giant landslides, extensive landscape changes, and severe casualties across Taiwan. Many of the giant landslides occurred on the lands inhabited by indigenous peoples, and thus they suffer from the most adverse impacts of climate change. Indigenous peoples are, but not the only, climate victims.

Different Shades of Green: Indigenous Protests Against Solar Energy

14 July 2020 Editor

Written by Daniel Davies. On June 3rd, 2020 Taiwan Sugar Corporation CEO, Chen Zao-yi, travelled south to Pingtung County for the most recent talks surrounding a proposed 230-hectare solar farm project at Xinchi Farm in Wanluan Township. The green-energy project, which is to be built alongside the No.185 County Road, has been at the centre of sustained protests by local residents due to the planned felling of Taiwan’s largest planted forest. The site of the development is within the 10,815-hectare forest planted in 2002 by the Taiwan Sugar Corporation, using 5.2 billions of dollars of state subsidies, after the contraction of the sugar industry caused by Taiwan joining the WTO.

Why Do Taiwan’s Environmentalists Oppose Renewable Energy Facilities?

13 July 2020 Editor

Written by Ming-sho Ho. Upon winning the re-election in January 2020, Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party government is set to realise the goal of abolishing nuclear energy by 2025. At the same time, they wish to raise the proportion of green energy in the electricity mix to twenty per cent. While the dream of “nuclear-free homeland” has been championed by Taiwan’s environmentalists for more than three decades, the top-down push for renewable energy has unexpectedly met some opposition from the same camp.

DocuSky and Digital Humanities Research

10 July 2020 Editor

Written By Chijui Hu. Making masses of recourses accessible through digitisation is one of the core tasks for those wanting to promote digital humanities research. After twenty years of digitising archival efforts, Taiwan has amassed a sizeable digitised collection of primary materials and resources. Digital presentation of an indexing dataset in databases has facilitated far-reaching research work. However, the fact that each database has its own format and functions with its own tools makes it challenging to integrate material from multiple databases. That is, many materials have been digitised, but they cannot be used together.

Preserving the History of the Present: Lessons from National Taiwan University Web Archiving System (NTUWAS)

8 July 2020 Editor

Written by the team at NTUWAS. The 21st century is, of course, very much still ongoing. We have worked to preserve documents from defining events such as the 2003 SARS pandemic and the flooding that occurred in Southern Taiwan in 2008. Recently, we have been working on recording the digital history of the ongoing pandemic and have created a new event section titled “COVID-19”

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