Adaptation action is not just about disaster prevention; it must also be put into practice in daily life and sustainability

Text / Li Chun-kuan

Rural communities are experiencing the impacts of climate change, so they must also begin to take corresponding adaptation actions, starting from two aspects: first, reducing the impacts brought by disasters and cultivating the resilience to recover from disasters; second, treating the crisis of facing disasters as an opportunity for community/industry transformation and redevelopment.

However, because each community faces different climate change conditions, the aspects that communities need to adapt are also quite diverse, such as the construction of disaster prevention hardware, industrial adaptation, adjustments to lifestyle, and so on. Although the government currently does not have a policy directly named "adaptation," it is gradually finding adaptation plans within the business of various ministries that can mitigate climate change while also allowing community participation.

Adaptation action is not just about disaster prevention; it focuses more on practice in daily life and sustainability

The so-called climate adaptation plans may seem like a very large concept, but in fact they can also start from a very small scope. The Environmental Protection Administration's "Low-Carbon Sustainable Homeland" plan aims at energy saving and carbon reduction, encouraging communities to promote green roofs, build ecological ponds and other green beautification measures, and assisting in the installation of rainwater recycling equipment, solar photovoltaic and green transportation systems, which are not only environmentally friendly but also beautify neighborhoods.

For example, Jinhua Village in South District, Tainan City, intercepts rainwater to cultivate flower seedlings, combines it with fish farming in ecological ponds, turns excrement into fertilizer to nourish plants, and creates a community flower garden, forming a low-carbon community with the characteristic of "fish-flower symbiosis."

In places close to mountains or forest land, the Forestry Bureau of the Council of Agriculture continues the "National Afforestation Program" from more than ten years ago and promotes the "Sustainable and Diversified Forestry Guidance Program," with the goal of reducing forest land loss caused by excessive logging and transforming toward a sustainable under-forest economy. For example, it encourages seedling cultivation and afforestation, as well as the development of new under-forest economic products such as shiitake mushrooms and beekeeping. In the sixth article of this series, the Dawu Tribe in Wutai Township, Pingtung County developed a local characteristic industry of raising chickens under the forest and planting Angelica dahurica.

However, in some places that frequently face actual floods and debris flow disasters, carrying out only the above adaptation actions may be too slow to meet urgent needs. The "Self-Reliant Disaster Prevention Community" plan of the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau of the Council of Agriculture and the Water Resources Agency of the Ministry of Economic Affairs guides community residents to simulate disaster situations, hoping that residents can participate in disaster response and post-disaster recovery work to protect their own homes.

By consolidating the above policy plans, it can be found that so-called adaptation actions are not merely "disaster prevention"; they also include the establishment of low-carbon lifestyles, or sustainable transformation in which industry and the natural environment coexist. And even the "Self-Reliant Disaster Prevention Community" plan, which appears most directly related to "disaster prevention," in actual operation also emphasizes the creativity and sustainability of disaster prevention actions.

When the government transforms its existing policies to use them as "adaptation action" programs, some cognitive gaps may arise. For example, some residents promoting disaster prevention communities will ask, "Disaster prevention is disaster prevention; what creativity or sustainability can there be?" In this section, we will take the operation of "Self-Reliant Disaster Prevention Communities" as an example to explain some contradictions that may arise with local communities when the logic of a policy originally aimed at "disaster prevention" shifts to having to also take "sustainable innovation" into account.

The shift in disaster response thinking: from hardware engineering to resilient communities

In the early period, the government's way of responding to potential disasters was to prevent disasters from occurring by strengthening hardware construction. But the protection of engineering ultimately has its limits. As extreme climate events appear more and more frequently, the government and academia have gradually shifted from the engineering thinking of "preventing disasters from occurring" to the resilience thinking of "coexisting with disasters," emphasizing the cultivation of society's ability to recover after being impacted by disasters.

And the concept of "Self-Reliant Disaster Prevention Communities" has also shifted from the early individual training of "disaster prevention specialists" to aiming at mobilizing all residents of the entire community.