Quest for net zero

Like 59 other countries that aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050, Taiwan will face challenges

By Tim Ferry



President Tsai Ing-wen pledged at a forum on environmental protection on 22 April this year, Earth Day, to put Taiwan on the path towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

"Most countries around the world are talking about achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and Taiwan is actively preparing to take steps toward this goal," she said at an Earth Day event in Taipei. "Taiwan will not be left to chase this international trend."

This pledge aligns Taiwan’s climate change goals with 59 countries around the world, including member states of the European Union (EU), the United States (US), and other leading countries, which collectively account for 54% of emissions, according to the World Resources Institute, a global research institute dedicated to finding solutions to environmental problems. Net zero emissions, in which the amount of greenhouse gases – primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) – emitted annually would not exceed the amount withdrawn from the atmosphere, is considered crucial to maintaining the average global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial temperatures, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If global temperatures were to rise higher than that, scientists maintain that global weather patterns would be profoundly disrupted, leading to widespread droughts, intensifying storms, biodiversity extinctions, and other calamities. International scientific consensus holds that limiting the global temperature rise to below this 1.5°C threshold requires cutting current emissions in half by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

"Reaching and sustaining net zero global anthropogenic CO2 emissions and declining net non-CO2 radiative forcing would halt anthropogenic global warming on multi-decadal time scales," the IPCC notes in its SPECIAL REPORT: GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5º C.

Tsai’s pledge was welcomed by local and global environmentalists as a signal that Taiwan is ready to play its part as a major industrial nation in fighting climate change.

"We didn't have the vision before for net zero," noted Hsu Huang-hsiung, Distinguished Research Fellow at the Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academia Sinica. "But now the EU, the UK [United Kingdom] and the US have all committed to the net zero goal, and our government has started talking about the net zero goal. That’s a good thing."

The pledge improves on Taiwan’s previous target, set in law in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act of 2015, to halve 2005 emissions levels by 2050.

"Although Taiwan is not a signatory party to the UNFCCC, we still have actively anchored global climate action in line with the Paris Agreement," said Tsai Ling-yi (蔡玲儀) director of carbon emissions reduction in Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration (EPA). "In 2015 we formulated the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act to pursue the below 2º C goal as our long-term national goal."

This act will be amended to reflect the new net-zero target, putting Taiwan in an elite group of only five nations that include net zero goals in their legal frameworks, including the UK and New Zeeland. The remaining nations in the net zero club have either made specific net zero policies, such as the United States and most EU countries, or have made pledges, including Japan, Brazil, and many others. China has pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2060.

Several factors prompted the move towards net zero, not least the threat of tariffs on Taiwan’s exports by the EU through its developing carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM).

"As the climate challenge is inherently global, the EU wants its international partners to share a comparable level of ambition (in reducing greenhouse gas emissions)," wrote Thomas Jurgensen, deputy head of the European Economic and Trade Office in Taiwan in an email exchange. He noted that if climate action is not taken on a global level, there is a threat of "carbon leakage", with "companies transferring production to places where decarbonisation requirements are less strict and, as a result, increase their emissions there, thus leading to a global increase of emissions. This would end up undermining global climate action efforts." To prevent this, the EU is formulating the CBAM that would place tariffs on imports from economies which lag in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"We are dependent on foreign trade. We know that the EU is considering implementing the Carbon Border Adjustment tariff, which will impact international trade," said the EPA’s Tsai. "The green economy has become mainstream. As a member of the global village, Taiwan has to face its national emissions."

Global brands, particularly in the tech sector, including Google, Microsoft, and Apple, have pledged to reduce their carbon footprints, and are pressuring their supply chain partners to do the same. Major Taiwanese exporters, including Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Company (UMC) have already joined the RE100, a global organization of major corporations which have pledged to only consume power generated through renewable energy.

Taiwan’s recent experience with its changing climate is another factor. Prior to recent rains, the drought experienced on Taiwan’s west and south had been the worst in 100 years, and temperatures reached record highs in May.

"The impact of climate change has not been so severe until this year," noted Academia Sinica’s Hsu. "It’s a wakeup call for Taiwan."

To reach its net zero goals, Taiwan formed a Net-Zero Pathway Task Force within the Executive Yuan at the end of 2020, prior to Tsai’s announcement, bolstering its Office of Carbon Reduction in creating a roadmap to reach the net zero goal. The task force is looking at financial and other incentives to stimulate investment in renewable energies and energy efficiencies, electric vehicles, and carbon capture technologies, as well as how best to communicate the net zero vision to the public.