Chia-Wei Chao

Taiwan Climate Action Network

Despite international efforts to address human-caused climate change, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. However, existing literature often overlooks the role of the state and social actors in exacerbating or mitigating emissions. This study adopts the political-economic embeddedness perspective to argue that the role of the state and socia...

This focus review summarizes climate politics in Taiwan at the global, the national, and the local level. The article begins with an introduction to Taiwan's emission profile, major actors, and recent policy development. At the global level, Taiwan's unique international status has limited its responses to climate change as mostly gesture policies,...

Phasing out fossil fuel vehicles is an indispensable pillar to decarbonize the transportation sector. In 2017, Taiwan proposed to ban all new sales of gasoline-powered scooters by 2035 and passenger cars by 2040. In less than two years, the phase-out policy was suspended. We explore this policy failure through the lens of multi-level perspective (M...

In the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan, with its universal masking policy, slowed down the spread of cases and flattened its epidemic curve without enforcing lockdown or mass quarantine in 2020. This study identifies the distinguishing features of Taiwan’s universal masking policy practice, such as priority, continuous improvement, mult...

The goal of this study is to analyze decarbonization pathways for Taiwan, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement: achieving a 2°C increase by 2100, aiming for 1.5°C. We use GCAM, an integrated assessment model, in order to evaluate the different implications of decarbonization in this region. We find that, if Taiwan wants to be consistent wi...

Steel, cement, petrochemical industries and heavy road transport are viewed as harder-to-abate sectors due to the high mitigation cost, slow capital turnover and regulatory capture bond with international competitiveness. However, those sectors contribute 40% of CO2 emission in Taiwan, which implies that the decarbonization in Taiwan is more challe...

Taiwan has placed itself on an accelerated transition pathway towards a “nuclear free homeland” and low-carbon economy, through the imposition of a legally binding goal to phase out the all nuclear power and reducing the electricity production from coal from 47% to 26% in 2025. The government has attempted to achieve the ambition through the expans...

“Planetary Boundaries” had become an influential narrative to guide the sustainability transition since it been proposed in 2009. The research teams with 28 internationally renowned scientists identified nine critical thresholds for the human development, which include climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, biological...

Taiwan is attempting to implement the concept of a green economy through a Low Carbon Growth Plan (LCGP). However, the existing decision support tools for this measure have three key limitations: ignorance regarding the open economy; a lack of life cycle thinking; and limited categories of environmental impact. This study integrates environmentally...

This paper examines the health implications of global PM reduction accompanying greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the 180 national economies of the global macroeconomy. A human health effects module based on empirical data on GHG emissions, PM emissions, background PM concentrations, source apportionment and human health risk coefficients is u...

We develop a novel inventory method called Dynamic Hybrid Multi-Region Inventory analysis (DHMRI), which integrates the EEMRIOA and Integrated Hybrid LCA and applies time-dependent environmental intervention information for inventory analysis. Consequently, DHMRI is able to quantify the change in the environmental footprint caused by a specific pol...

Over the past two decades, the waste reduction problem has been a major issue in environmental protection. Both recycling and waste reduction policies have become increasingly important. As the complexity of decision-making has increased, it has become evident that more factors must be considered in the development and implementation of policies ai...

Many life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods have been developed, including the Centre of Environmental Science (CML), Eco-indicator 99, Eco-indicator 95, environmental priority strategies, IMPACT 2002+, and Environmental Design of Industrial Products (EDIP). Most of these methods were developed in the European countries. For a country which at...

Dioxins have caused numerous toxic and pollution incidents in Taiwan, where the management of dioxins has been focused mainly on the establishment of emission standards and inventory. The currently applied approach features source reduction and monitoring of annual emission trend of dioxins, but the comprehensiveness of management still needs to be...

The Kyoto Protocol forced to limit anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change. The sources of CO 2 emissions in buildings are typically high electricity consumption of building equipment and household appliances, for example, air-conditioning, lighting, power, computer washing machine, etc. Therefore, the electricity use and...