Influenced by advanced urban development and climate change, all metropolitan cities in the world are facing floods, heat waves, storms, droughts, and other water related disasters and challenges. Extreme climate is not only a great threat to people’s lives and properties, it also affects the sustainable development of cities. Accordingly, by creating a sponge city to effectively regulate the microclimate in the city, it can also reduce urban heat island effect; promote Garden City and advocate the concept of food and agricultural education, and combine them with green transportation, green energy, and energy saving strategies. Promote the goal of mitigation and adapting to climate change, then the vision of a resilient city with climate safe will be achieved.
Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries.
Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning.
Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning.
To realize the vision of “livable and sustainable city”, establish a city of “disaster resilience”and“environmental sustainability”, the City has drafted a Taipei City area disaster prevention and relief plan which will be used as comprehensive disaster prevention planning guide, continue to strengthen disaster risk management.
Given the characteristics of disasters over the past years, the City also took reference to the "Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030" to check and examine the City’s various policies and results In 2019, by means of "Propose Disaster Risk Reduction Targets", "Understand Disaster Risks","Managing Disaster Risk with Disaster Risk Governance", "Invest in Disaster Reduction Work to Enhance Disaster Tolerance", "Enhance Disaster Preparedness to Strengthen Response Work, and achieve the Goal of more Disaster-resistant Reconstruction during the Reconstruction Process", "With Regular Evaluation and Implementation of Work Items and a Mechanism for Public Reporting of Progress” to ensure that the established plans would be consistent with the goals and indicators in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction.
In response to the ever-increasing climatechange, continue to simulate and analyze the risks of potential situations of various disasters, and consider the impact of climate change, set the conditions according to the scale of the disaster, formulate the annual goals of the government and key disaster prevention work items for decision-makers, the general public and high-risk communities for reference, through multi-channel advocacy, to adopt the most efficient way of education for disaster risk communication, so that the public can understand the disaster risk of the environment. Through the overall urban disaster prevention planning and disaster evacuation sites and route planning, the use and management of land disaster reduction and various disaster prevention facilities (such as retaining walls, dykes, underground rain channel) are inspected regularly and patched accordingly. Review approaches periodically, formulate SOPs and inspection lists for various operations, review disaster prevention policies anytime, and continue the improvements to ensure the implementation of disaster prevention and relief work.
In order to effectively implement the post-disaster recovery process to ensure the safety of people's lives and property and the sustainable development of the city. The City has formulated a post-disaster recovery plan and standard operating procedures, necessary post-disaster financial measures, assistance and compensation for disaster victims, reconstruction of infrastructure and public facilities, recovery of environment, post-disaster relief, price stability of merchandizes, and post-trauma psychological treatments and other rehabilitative items. In addition, in order to accelerate the implementation of post-disaster recovery and reconstruction plans, to consider the complex cross-departmental collaboration of post-disaster recovery and reconstruction work, and increase the effectiveness of post-disaster recovery and reconstruction work, the “Taipei City Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction Program” was drafted.
Furthermore, in order to deliver post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, depending on the scale and needs of the disaster, according to Article 37 of the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act and Article 7 of the Taipei City Disaster Prevention Regulations, the Reconstruction Promotion Committee shall be composed of personnel from various agencies, with the preceding regulations to handle all post-disaster recovery and reconstruction work
Faced with global climate change and regional extreme climates, the City has long committed to flood control and drainage construction and river remediation, with the goal of providing people with a safe and livable waterfront city. However, in the face of arduous extreme climate challenges and competition for water resources in the future, the City takes the sponge city concept as the core of its water environment policy, with “resilience and adaptation”, “sustainable water age”, and “vibrant water environment” as the three major visions outlining a safe, sustainable, water-friendly, and ecological blueprint for Taipei’s water environment.
The sponge city promotes six goals: “restoring the urban water cycle”, “increasing flood-resisting capacity”, “stable and efficient water supply”, “diverse water reuse sources”, “livable natural habitats”, and “promoting waterfront activities”, to develop a total of about 29 billion budgets over five years through 13 strategies and 190 projects. Make use of engineering and management methods to further implement the water-permeable pavement, increase the urban green coverage rate, promote the construction of green roofs, increase the capacity of urban storage for flood retention, promote the upgrading of sewage treatment, diversify the reclaimed water utilization, restore and protect the water environment habitat, create a hydrophilic recreational environment, so that the city has the ability to infiltrate and retain water, and the evaporated water vapor can adjust the urban microclimate.
The use of water-permeable pavements will be promoted through public facilities ( sidewalks, park squares, campuses and parking lots, etc.) to achieve evapotranspiration, after absorbing rain and evaporating sun. From 2015 to 2019, 219,231 m2 of the City's sidewalks, park squares, campuses and parking lots had been constructed with waterpermeable pavements, which is equivalent to about 521 basketball courts. Also, through actual monitoring, the average monthly maximum cooling effect of permeable bricks compared with which could successfully reduce the surrounding temperature by about 1.42~5.86℃. It is evident that permeable pavements have the effect of regulating the microclimate and reducing the urban heat island effect.
In order to reduce the urban heat island effect and the effect of apportioning surface runoff of the catchment area, the water conservation design of the building site for schools, parks and parking lots with more than 800m2 area will be implemented, and the priority method is green land or infiltration. The total volume of water retention was 82,244m3 from 2015 to 2019.
Those who construct more than 300m2 site through the public and private sector must set up rainwater outflow suppression facilities, and meet the minimum water retention of 780m3 per hectare and maximum discharge of 0.173m3/s, to achieve the concept of shared runoff control. The total water retention volume was 28,426m3 from 2015 to 2019 .
Through the setup of rainwater tank in parks, the surface runoff from rainy days isstored in the facility, replacing tap water for plantwatering, toilet flushing, sprinkler cooling andecological supplements to achieve sustainablewater resources. The total volume from 2015 to2019 of water storage setup in 25 parks reached1,408.63m3 in the City.
The city's greenhouse gas reduction target is to set 2005 as the base year of greenhouse gas emissions. The target for 2030 is 25% lower than the base year, and the target for 2050 is 50% lower than the base year. In 2019, the emissions of greenhouse gas has reduced by 11.31% compared with 2005, and will gradually reach the reduction target.
The greenhouse gas reduction strategy includes the establishment of the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Supervisory Report”, regularly updating greenhouse gas emission data, promotion of greenhouse gas reduction strategy details, and promote residential and commercial energy saving action plans of replacing old equipment with smart use of electricity, increasing the amount of renewable energy, developing electric vehicles to increase green transportation. Review the reduction targets every five years in periodically to achieve the goals at a steady and pragmatic pace.
The City plans to establish an environmental education counseling group. In 2019, Taipei City School Environmental Education Center ( TCSEEC ) was combined with a three-level environmental education counseling group to focus on five major themes such as environmental ethics, climate change, disaster prevention education, sustainable use of energy resources and sustainable development education. Plan three courses of “green simplicity”, “environmental protection” and “sustainable development”, and develop environmental education action strategies to shape examples of environmental education seed school, promote regional sustainable campus partner organizations, and practice sustainability of the campus and people and prosperity of the environment, a total of 14 environmental education sub-projects were organized, and the concept of climate change was gradually taking root in the people's basic concepts of climate change, so to increase the basic knowledge of climate change in the public minds.