Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Solomon203/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT (EIA) process in Taiwan has come under criticism from civil groups recently on several fronts. These criticisms generally revolve around the view that the EIA process lacks transparency and avenues for participation by civic groups.
Last month, environmental groups held a press conference to call for increased participation and oversight in the EIA process. Among the groups that participated were the Environmental Jurists’ Foundation, Taiwan Ecological Engineering Development Foundation, Changhua Environmental Protection Union, and Government Watch Alliance. TPP legislator Chen Gau-tzu was also present.
In particular, environmental groups highlighted that the EIA process had been changed under Environmental Protection Administration minister Chang Tzi-chin. Previously, civil society groups that participated in the EIA process were allowed to dialogue with developers. But under the new regulations, civic groups were only given three minutes each to question developers, who were not obligated to respond to concerns from civil society groups. Calls, then, were for civil society groups to be given more time. New tools using AI, too, were highlighted as potentially allowing for accessible meeting minutes.
To this extent, the government was called on to take more steps to allow members of the general public to participate in the EIA process. At present, notifications about public hearings about EIAs are given to borough chiefs and township offices, but the government was urged to use text messages and other means of communication to boost public participation.
Previously, environmental groups criticized the composition of the EIA board. Over half of the members were grandfathered in from preceding EIA boards. However, civil society groups mostly focused fire on that representation for the public health and the medical sector was removed, while there are only two members of the EIA committee who have a background in ecology. This is the lowest in the history of EIA committees in Taiwan, while there were no representatives from civil society groups.
Moreover, 10 of the 14 members had a background in engineering, consisting of nine members who had backgrounds in environmental engineering and one with a background in ocean engineering. This was understood as favoring technical viewpoints and the perspectives of engineers over ecology. One engineer, Chien Lien-kwei, who teaches ocean engineering at National Taiwan Ocean University, was previously accused of seeking to change the meeting room for the EIA Hsieh-ho Power Plant conversion project to keep civil society groups from attending. The past records of other appointees, too, were criticized.
In particular, the EIA process has long been accused by environmental groups for being insufficiently transparent and serving as a rubber-stamp process. Most EIAs are passed, and it is relatively rare for EIAs to be rejected–though even in cases where EIAs are turned down, sometimes it is the case that development projects go ahead anyway. When public participation is sought, this is often seen as only aimed at shoring up legitimacy for development projects rather than genuinely taking the viewpoints of the public into consideration. At other points, the government seeks to avoid conducting EIAs altogether, including on the basis of infrastructure that dates to the Japanese colonial period. Or certain features of development projects are left out of the EIA process, either through lack of oversight or because developers add new features to plans.
It is to be seen if there will be sufficient pressure on the government to change the EIA process. Ironically, the KMT has taken aim at the DPP’s energy policy, hitting out at renewables as a new and untested form of energy. But even then, this serves to illustrate how environmental protection is only an issue that the pan-Blue camp seeks to use to hit out at the DPP, as observed when the KMT occasionally sides with environmentalists as a means of attacking DPP-led development projects. If there have been various individual instances in which the EIA process has been accused of being flawed, this rarely ever translates to calls to overhaul the process itself. There is a decided lack of interest in changing the overall EIA process, then, even when it has proven evidently flawed. It remains to be seen how environmental groups can put the issue of EIAs on the negotiating table politically.