Compound disasters on hillslopes intensify; smart soil and sediment monitoring and inter-ministerial integration advance together
Taiwan has fragile geology and frequent natural disasters. Every typhoon, flood and debris flow causes severe damage. Li Chen-yang, Director-General of the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau of the Council of Agriculture, pointed out that since Typhoon Morakot (the August 8 flood disaster), the hillslope environment no longer faces the single disaster types mentioned above, but compound disasters; these single-type disasters may occur simultaneously on hillslopes.
In response to Taiwan's compound disaster predicament and to improve the effectiveness of debris flow monitoring, the Council of Agriculture recently held the "Soil and Sediment Forum." At the forum, Li said that Taiwan may again experience a compound disaster like Typhoon Morakot in the future, and must prepare in advance and think about how to respond. The upper, middle and lower reaches must all be integrated. He hopes that industry, government, academia and research sectors will offer opinions. In the future, small expert meetings will be convened successively for integration, policy priorities will be proposed, and budgets will be allocated for implementation.
Climate change intensifies; compound disasters are a hard problem
Climate change intensifies disaster risk. Li pointed out that rainfall patterns are changing more and more, "the dry season gets drier, and the wet season gets wetter." The frequency and timing of extreme weather such as heavy torrential rain and strong typhoons are increasing, shortening the time for disaster prevention and response, expanding the areas where disasters are distributed, and increasing the scale of disasters and losses.
Facing ever-larger disaster scale and impact, in 2015 the government also approved the "Large-Scale Landslide Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Plan under Climate Change," taking holistic disaster prevention as the thinking and settlement safety as the core, to build a complete smart hillslope disaster prevention system, in order to respond to crises like the large-scale landslide at Xiaolin Village, take stock of high-risk areas in Taiwan, and discuss how to mitigate disasters in the future. "Disasters cannot be prevented from occurring, but they can be mitigated."
Li said that 549 "self-reliant disaster prevention communities" have now been established across Taiwan to strengthen the response capacity of grassroots disaster prevention communities, telling them exactly where the dangers are, how to respond when facing danger, and where to go for evacuation and shelter. Communities are also divided into groups; for example, the elderly, weak, women and children are each assigned to different groups. When an emergency evacuation order is issued, it is very clear who should lead whom to evacuate; upon receiving the order, they go to the corresponding people, making debris flow disasters smaller. At the same time, evacuation drills and disaster prevention supplies are also carried out, so that communities are always ready to evacuate.
