Taipei, March 16 (CNA) The National Development Council (NDC) will soon present a road map for Taiwan to achieve net zero emissions, NDC head Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) told lawmakers Wednesday.
At a legislative hearing, Kung said the proposal for reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 will be made public by the end of March and lay out the country's future energy mix.
It will also include proposals for revising laws and regulations to facilitate efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and measures to promote new technologies, such as electric vehicles, he said.
Last year, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) pledged Taiwan will join with over 120 countries in the world to try to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, through an economy that either emits no greenhouse gas emissions or offsets its emissions.
She said the government would draw up a road map toward net zero emissions in 2022 to provide guidelines to government agencies as well as the private sector.
Kung did not provide any other details on what the plan may include, but Taiwan's efforts to date on renewable energy have focused on solar power and offshore wind power.
The government had planned for renewable energy to account for 20 percent of Taiwan's electricity supply by 2025, though those plans have fallen behind schedule.
Other options floated by the NDC have been seeking international cooperation on the development of hydrogen energy and carbon capture and storage technology.
The council said it has been in talks with industry representatives on the promotion of decarbonized energy systems, higher energy efficiency in various industries, green transportation, and negative emission technologies.
Though the 2050 goal of net-zero emissions has been widely adopted, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest report on climate change issued at the end of February painted an extremely grim picture of the future and said more urgency was needed now.
Many of the effects of climate change would be worse than previously predicted, the report said, and action, including the safeguarding and strengthening of nature, could no longer be put off.
"The world faces unavoidable multiple climate hazards over the next two decades with global warming of 1.5°C. Even temporarily exceeding this warming level will result in additional severe impacts, some of which will be irreversible," the IPCC said in a statement on the report.
"Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future,”warned IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair Hans-Otto Pörtner.
Sources:Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC )
