After COP comes the next COP. The fourth United Nations Conference to Combat Desertification is taking place this week and next, addressing the growing issue of land degradation and desertification. These challenges, often linked to the climate crisis, are becoming increasingly pressing, even in Europe. We explore why this matters globally and regionally.
In Ukraine, the battle is not against heat but the cold and ongoing conflict. Marilen Martin delves into the country’s efforts to combat power outages through renewable energy, despite significant investments still flowing into fossil fuels.
We also spotlight Taiwan’s unique role in international climate action, navigating its exclusion from COPs, and Vanuatu’s groundbreaking legal case aimed at defining state obligations in the climate crisis. These stories illustrate the multifaceted dimensions of global climate struggles.
Stay with us for deeper insights and updates!
In the midst of war and facing a harsh winter, Ukraine is currently faced with a dual task in energy policy: Securing the current supply of electricity and heat from fossil fuels and the nuclear sector despite the massive Russian attacks – and at the same time building up renewable energies. Despite ambitious climate targets, new fossil fuel power plants will probably have to be built if the damage continues.
Just last week, Russia once again attacked the Ukrainian power supply. Since the start of the war, Russia has destroyed, occupied or severely damaged around two-thirds of the energy infrastructure. “We have lost many gigawatts of generation capacity and we need to bring it back into the energy system,” explains Julia Usenko from the All-Ukrainian Sustainable Development & Investment Agency to Table.Briefings.
The damage leads to power cuts: After the attacks on Nov. 28 alone, more than a million people were without electricity. Diesel generators for emergency supplies can be found on almost every street corner. However, as these are expensive and have to be switched off every twelve hours for maintenance, private households, companies and public buildings such as schools and hospitals are increasingly installing solar power systems.
The government wants to promote the expansion of renewable energies throughout the country in order to make the power supply more resilient. In contrast to large power plants, which are often the target of Russian missile and drone attacks, solar panels and wind turbines are more decentralized and therefore more difficult to destroy. Renewables already accounted for ten percent of electricity generation in 2023, and this figure is set to rise to 27 percent by 2030. Until the start of the war in 2014, Ukraine’s electricity supply was heavily reliant on coal, gas, and nuclear power.
The legal framework conditions for the expansion of renewables have been improved since 2022. The country now wants to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Until the Russian war of aggression, the climate targets were classified as highly inadequate – since 2022, the assessment by the Climate Action Tracker consortium has been suspended. The climate policy ambitions are also being driven by potential EU membership, which would also include climate targets. A Green Transition Office was opened at the beginning of November with the support of the UK, the country has joined the European electricity grid and the Department of Energy is planning to introduce its own emissions trading system.
At the end of October, 110 megawatts of solar and wind farm projects were awarded in a pilot auction, which receive a guaranteed minimum price for the electricity they feed into the grid. Such initiatives are intended to attract urgently needed private capital into the indebted sector.
Ukrainian companies invested around USD 150 million in solar energy in 2023 alone. However, international investors remain cautious due to the risk of war and the lack of profitability of projects. In addition, there are doubts about the reliability of state payments, as the government retroactively cut a “green feed-in tariff” introduced in 2009 by 40 percent in 2019 due to financial bottlenecks.
This makes financial support from governments and international financial institutions all the more important. Just last week, the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action announced that it would contribute a further €65 million to the multinational Ukrainian Energy Fund, through which various countries have pledged a total of €918 million in support for the Ukrainian energy system since 2022. At 44 percent, Germany is by far the largest donor to the fund.
However, the money from this fund will hardly flow into renewables, but mainly into fossil fuel infrastructure. When asked by Table.Briefings, the ministry stated that of the €140 million coming from Germany, for which supply contracts have already been signed, €114 million will go towards the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure – and over 90 percent of this is for destroyed fossil fuel power plants. The remaining €26 million will go towards the construction of new decentralized, mobile gas turbines.
Despite the promotion of solar and wind energy, investments in fossil fuel power plants are urgently needed to plug an estimated two to four gigawatt gap in the electricity supply this winter. “We can’t afford to just build wind turbines,” says Anna Ackermann from the International Institute for Sustainable Development in talks with Table.Briefings. “We need to protect and repair what we have while developing green projects – all at the same time.”
However, nuclear power remains the backbone of the electricity supply, providing more than half of the country’s electricity. Ukraine ended its dependence on Russian nuclear fuel in 2022 and is now cooperating with the US company Westinghouse for fuel and new plants, including plans for modular reactors.
Various NGOs criticize the fact that there is no public debate about these plans. They fear that the centralized nuclear power plants would be vulnerable to further attacks by Russia and that construction would take too long to solve the current energy crisis. Kostiantyn Krynytski from the NGO Ecodia tells Table.Briefings that Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko is perceived as a strong supporter of nuclear power because he previously worked at the state-owned company Energoatom, which is responsible for Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. In the summer, Halushchenko caused a stir when he presented plans to purchase a Russian nuclear reactor from Bulgaria.
The UN Conference on Deserts and Land Policy (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, UNCCD) brings the series of international conferences on environmental issues to a close at the end of the year. After the meetings on biodiversity, climate, and plastic pollution, COP16 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which runs until Dec. 13, is primarily intended to strengthen global resilience to droughts, including by tightening the legal obligations of states.
The focus is also on financing the fight against desertification. Soil degradation is not only an issue for the classic desert countries; the topic is also becoming increasingly important in Europe, for example. In southern European countries in particular, soil degradation is having an increasingly negative impact on agriculture.
An area almost three times the size of Germany – around one million square kilometers of productive land – is lost every year due to land degradation and desertification. According to a recent report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), an area of around 15 million square kilometers – larger than Antarctica – has already been degraded. The IPCC looked at this in detail in a Special Report on Climate Change and Land. The result: between 1980 and 2000, “desertification hotspots” increased by around 9.2 percent worldwide, and this development directly affects around half a billion people. Desertification and land degradation lead to the loss of biodiversity, but also to crop failures, and thus increase hunger and poverty.
UNCCD Secretary-General Ibrahim Thiaw estimates that one billion US dollars a day would be needed to combat desertification. By the end of the decade, the restoration of degraded soils will require at least 2.6 trillion US dollars in funding. This was stated by a UN official at the start of COP16 in an interview with Reuters, putting a figure on the total costs for the first time. However, only 66 billion US dollars are currently available.
According to Thiaw, the additional funds would have to come primarily from private sources. Furthermore, states need more far-reaching legal obligations to protect land and soil: Countries have currently committed to protecting 900 million hectares of land. According to Thiaw, however, a more ambitious target of 1.5 billion hectares and more speed in implementation are needed.
For the UN, “desertification” refers not only to desertification in the narrower sense but also to other types of land degradation (“land degradation”) in “drylands.” The degradation process differs from droughts and dry seasons in that it is long-lasting and difficult to reverse. Although the regions most at risk from desertification are in the Global South, particularly in Asia and Africa, desertification is also a serious threat in Europe.
Around eight percent of the European Union’s surface area has a “high” or “very high” sensitivity to desertification. According to a study by the European Court of Auditors, these areas are mainly located in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain, and Portugal. As a result of climate change, the risk of desertification in Europe continues to increase, with 62 percent of soils in the EU already considered to be degraded.
“Humans are mostly to blame,” says Roger Funk from the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in an interview with Table.Briefings. In particular, the conversion of forests to arable land and the overuse of water as a resource are driving the degradation of land and soil. In Germany, we cannot yet speak of desertification in the narrower sense, but we can already see a worrying decline in soil fertility, Funk said.
Regions with frequent, prolonged drought and sandy soils that favor soil erosion by wind or water are particularly at risk. These include parts of Brandenburg, for example. There is less rainfall there and water evaporates more quickly due to higher temperatures. The sandy soils with a low humus content that predominate there are particularly susceptible to erosion. As a result, the water retention capacity of the soil decreases. Funk calls this a “self-reinforcing process.” The danger behind this: At some point, the soil is degraded to such an extent that it can no longer be used for agriculture, resulting in crop failures.
There are various reasons for the expansion of deserts. Human activities, in particular the expansion of arable land, lead to land degradation. However, climate change also contributes to this, particularly through:
Conversely, desertification also exacerbates climate change: The loss of vegetation leads to the greenhouse gases bound in it being released into the atmosphere, meaning carbon reserves are lost. Less vegetation also means that less CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere.
There is no single solution to soil degradation, says Funk. However, greening and ground cover can help. This protects the soil from erosion, rainfall can seep away better and evaporation is reduced by shading and reducing wind speed close to the ground.
Together with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the UNCCD is one of the Rio Conventions that were adopted following the Earth Summit in 1992. At the time, the UNCCD was seen in particular as an “African convention”; African countries hoped that it would provide them with funding to combat desertification – largely in vain. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the UNCCD, COP16 will be the largest UN land conference to date and the first UNCCD COP in the Middle East and North Africa region with first-hand knowledge of the impacts of desertification, land degradation, and droughts.
When the world’s heads of state and government negotiate the future of the planet in Azerbaijan these days, one of the largest economies will be excluded. Although Taiwan ranks 14th among the wealthiest countries in the world measured by average income per capita, Taiwan’s Environment Minister Peng Chi-ming and other government representatives have not been invited to the World Climate Summit. Only Taiwanese NGOs are allowed to attend the summit as observers.
Despite the exclusion, Taiwan follows the COP29 virtually. The Taiwanese Ministry of the Environment has set up a special “war room” where Minister Peng and his department heads follow the negotiations every evening. Interested citizens can watch the livestream on Facebook, while Taiwanese NGO representatives are connected directly from Baku and share the latest information.
As a trained meteorologist and entrepreneur, Peng has personally attended eleven COP summits. Table.Briefings met the minister last week in Taipei during a talk with international media. Peng is clearly aware of the urgency of the climate issue for Taiwan.
As a subtropical island, Taiwan is already severely affected by the effects of climate change. Peng expects temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius in summer to be the norm in just ten years. He stresses that Taiwan is increasingly characterized by extreme weather, with devastating typhoons on the one hand and periods of drought on the other. “In Taiwan, we have a love-hate relationship with typhoons. They bring important water resources, but they also claim lives every time,” he explains.
These effects already have an economic impact on every single citizen through so-called “green inflation.” “This is not necessarily triggered by the levying of CO2 charges; it also happens that a typhoon destroys our crops and causes prices to skyrocket.”
The spread of infectious diseases such as dengue fever illustrates Taiwan’s climate vulnerability. Once confined to the south, the mosquito-borne disease increasingly appears in northern Taiwan. “We expect dengue fever to spread further north from Southeast Asia in the future and possibly also reach Japan,” says Peng.
Although Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations, the country is voluntarily abiding by the guidelines of the World Climate Conference. “Taiwan will never be number one in climate action, but we want to catch up quickly,” emphasizes Peng. In 2015, Taiwan set itself the goal of cutting CO2 emissions by 50 percent until 2050. Last year, the parliament passed a law to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
An important step in this direction is the introduction of the “Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange,” a platform for trading emissions credits, launched last month. From 2026, a CO2 levy of 300 Taiwan dollars per ton will also apply to companies emitting more than 25,000 tons of CO2 annually. That is the equivalent of 8.75 euros. The calculation is based on the previous year’s emissions.
In this context, Minister Peng expressed his gratitude for the good cooperation with the Federal Republic of Germany. “Over the past seven years, Germany has supported Taiwan in many ways, for example, by training colleagues in the field of emissions trading. Germany has helped us considerably here,” Peng told Table.Briefings. The minister had visited Germany as recently as September last year. “I hope to lead a delegation to Germany again next year, as the emissions trading scheme will be an indispensable part of Taiwan’s environmental policy,” he added.
Last week, Udo Philipp, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, was also a guest in Taipei. Philipp and Peng had already met in Germany last year. The State Secretary attended two German-Taiwanese economic cooperation and trade policy conferences and visited the semiconductor manufacturer TSMC in Hsinchu.
Germany welcomes the new TSMC plant in Dresden but also has some reservations, for example, regarding water and electricity consumption and environmental standards, explains Peng. “As Environment Minister, I have explained our position on TSMC. It reassured the Germans to hear first-hand that TSMC’s environmental standards are high.” He added that the exchange with Germany was extremely close.
Another government focus is the creation of a green growth fund worth 100 billion Taiwan dollars (around three billion euros). This fund is intended to support companies active in net zero emissions, the circular economy and other environmentally related projects.
Despite all efforts in emissions trading and green growth, Taiwan’s energy mix remains dominated by fossil fuels; coal and LNG accounted for almost 82 percent of electricity production last year. By 2030, the country aims to obtain 30 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, compared to currently just 9.5 percent. The expansion of wind energy is progressing slowly.
For the future, Peng envisions connecting Taiwan to international power grids. He points to Singapore, which plans to import green electricity from Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia via new undersea cables over the next few years, as it lacks land for solar and wind energy.
As an island that has to import 96.7 percent of its energy sources (including fuel), Taiwan is particularly vulnerable to geopolitical risks, such as a possible blockade by China. While Taiwan’s last nuclear reactor will be decommissioned in May next year, the public debate on nuclear power is still ongoing. Prime Minister Cho Jung-tai recently emphasized that Taiwan is open to using new nuclear technologies to meet the growing energy needs of the semiconductor and AI industries. David Demes
After COP comes the next COP. The fourth United Nations Conference to Combat Desertification is taking place this week and next, addressing the growing issue of land degradation and desertification. These challenges, often linked to the climate crisis, are becoming increasingly pressing, even in Europe. We explore why this matters globally and regionally.
In Ukraine, the battle is not against heat but the cold and ongoing conflict. Marilen Martin delves into the country’s efforts to combat power outages through renewable energy, despite significant investments still flowing into fossil fuels.
We also spotlight Taiwan’s unique role in international climate action, navigating its exclusion from COPs, and Vanuatu’s groundbreaking legal case aimed at defining state obligations in the climate crisis. These stories illustrate the multifaceted dimensions of global climate struggles.
Stay with us for deeper insights and updates!
In the midst of war and facing a harsh winter, Ukraine is currently faced with a dual task in energy policy: Securing the current supply of electricity and heat from fossil fuels and the nuclear sector despite the massive Russian attacks – and at the same time building up renewable energies. Despite ambitious climate targets, new fossil fuel power plants will probably have to be built if the damage continues.
Just last week, Russia once again attacked the Ukrainian power supply. Since the start of the war, Russia has destroyed, occupied or severely damaged around two-thirds of the energy infrastructure. “We have lost many gigawatts of generation capacity and we need to bring it back into the energy system,” explains Julia Usenko from the All-Ukrainian Sustainable Development & Investment Agency to Table.Briefings.
The damage leads to power cuts: After the attacks on Nov. 28 alone, more than a million people were without electricity. Diesel generators for emergency supplies can be found on almost every street corner. However, as these are expensive and have to be switched off every twelve hours for maintenance, private households, companies and public buildings such as schools and hospitals are increasingly installing solar power systems.
The government wants to promote the expansion of renewable energies throughout the country in order to make the power supply more resilient. In contrast to large power plants, which are often the target of Russian missile and drone attacks, solar panels and wind turbines are more decentralized and therefore more difficult to destroy. Renewables already accounted for ten percent of electricity generation in 2023, and this figure is set to rise to 27 percent by 2030. Until the start of the war in 2014, Ukraine’s electricity supply was heavily reliant on coal, gas, and nuclear power.
The legal framework conditions for the expansion of renewables have been improved since 2022. The country now wants to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Until the Russian war of aggression, the climate targets were classified as highly inadequate – since 2022, the assessment by the Climate Action Tracker consortium has been suspended. The climate policy ambitions are also being driven by potential EU membership, which would also include climate targets. A Green Transition Office was opened at the beginning of November with the support of the UK, the country has joined the European electricity grid and the Department of Energy is planning to introduce its own emissions trading system.
At the end of October, 110 megawatts of solar and wind farm projects were awarded in a pilot auction, which receive a guaranteed minimum price for the electricity they feed into the grid. Such initiatives are intended to attract urgently needed private capital into the indebted sector.
Ukrainian companies invested around USD 150 million in solar energy in 2023 alone. However, international investors remain cautious due to the risk of war and the lack of profitability of projects. In addition, there are doubts about the reliability of state payments, as the government retroactively cut a “green feed-in tariff” introduced in 2009 by 40 percent in 2019 due to financial bottlenecks.
This makes financial support from governments and international financial institutions all the more important. Just last week, the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action announced that it would contribute a further €65 million to the multinational Ukrainian Energy Fund, through which various countries have pledged a total of €918 million in support for the Ukrainian energy system since 2022. At 44 percent, Germany is by far the largest donor to the fund.
However, the money from this fund will hardly flow into renewables, but mainly into fossil fuel infrastructure. When asked by Table.Briefings, the ministry stated that of the €140 million coming from Germany, for which supply contracts have already been signed, €114 million will go towards the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure – and over 90 percent of this is for destroyed fossil fuel power plants. The remaining €26 million will go towards the construction of new decentralized, mobile gas turbines.
Despite the promotion of solar and wind energy, investments in fossil fuel power plants are urgently needed to plug an estimated two to four gigawatt gap in the electricity supply this winter. “We can’t afford to just build wind turbines,” says Anna Ackermann from the International Institute for Sustainable Development in talks with Table.Briefings. “We need to protect and repair what we have while developing green projects – all at the same time.”
However, nuclear power remains the backbone of the electricity supply, providing more than half of the country’s electricity. Ukraine ended its dependence on Russian nuclear fuel in 2022 and is now cooperating with the US company Westinghouse for fuel and new plants, including plans for modular reactors.
Various NGOs criticize the fact that there is no public debate about these plans. They fear that the centralized nuclear power plants would be vulnerable to further attacks by Russia and that construction would take too long to solve the current energy crisis. Kostiantyn Krynytski from the NGO Ecodia tells Table.Briefings that Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko is perceived as a strong supporter of nuclear power because he previously worked at the state-owned company Energoatom, which is responsible for Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. In the summer, Halushchenko caused a stir when he presented plans to purchase a Russian nuclear reactor from Bulgaria.
The UN Conference on Deserts and Land Policy (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, UNCCD) brings the series of international conferences on environmental issues to a close at the end of the year. After the meetings on biodiversity, climate, and plastic pollution, COP16 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which runs until Dec. 13, is primarily intended to strengthen global resilience to droughts, including by tightening the legal obligations of states.
The focus is also on financing the fight against desertification. Soil degradation is not only an issue for the classic desert countries; the topic is also becoming increasingly important in Europe, for example. In southern European countries in particular, soil degradation is having an increasingly negative impact on agriculture.
An area almost three times the size of Germany – around one million square kilometers of productive land – is lost every year due to land degradation and desertification. According to a recent report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), an area of around 15 million square kilometers – larger than Antarctica – has already been degraded. The IPCC looked at this in detail in a Special Report on Climate Change and Land. The result: between 1980 and 2000, “desertification hotspots” increased by around 9.2 percent worldwide, and this development directly affects around half a billion people. Desertification and land degradation lead to the loss of biodiversity, but also to crop failures, and thus increase hunger and poverty.
UNCCD Secretary-General Ibrahim Thiaw estimates that one billion US dollars a day would be needed to combat desertification. By the end of the decade, the restoration of degraded soils will require at least 2.6 trillion US dollars in funding. This was stated by a UN official at the start of COP16 in an interview with Reuters, putting a figure on the total costs for the first time. However, only 66 billion US dollars are currently available.
According to Thiaw, the additional funds would have to come primarily from private sources. Furthermore, states need more far-reaching legal obligations to protect land and soil: Countries have currently committed to protecting 900 million hectares of land. According to Thiaw, however, a more ambitious target of 1.5 billion hectares and more speed in implementation are needed.
For the UN, “desertification” refers not only to desertification in the narrower sense but also to other types of land degradation (“land degradation”) in “drylands.” The degradation process differs from droughts and dry seasons in that it is long-lasting and difficult to reverse. Although the regions most at risk from desertification are in the Global South, particularly in Asia and Africa, desertification is also a serious threat in Europe.
Around eight percent of the European Union’s surface area has a “high” or “very high” sensitivity to desertification. According to a study by the European Court of Auditors, these areas are mainly located in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain, and Portugal. As a result of climate change, the risk of desertification in Europe continues to increase, with 62 percent of soils in the EU already considered to be degraded.
“Humans are mostly to blame,” says Roger Funk from the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in an interview with Table.Briefings. In particular, the conversion of forests to arable land and the overuse of water as a resource are driving the degradation of land and soil. In Germany, we cannot yet speak of desertification in the narrower sense, but we can already see a worrying decline in soil fertility, Funk said.
Regions with frequent, prolonged drought and sandy soils that favor soil erosion by wind or water are particularly at risk. These include parts of Brandenburg, for example. There is less rainfall there and water evaporates more quickly due to higher temperatures. The sandy soils with a low humus content that predominate there are particularly susceptible to erosion. As a result, the water retention capacity of the soil decreases. Funk calls this a “self-reinforcing process.” The danger behind this: At some point, the soil is degraded to such an extent that it can no longer be used for agriculture, resulting in crop failures.
There are various reasons for the expansion of deserts. Human activities, in particular the expansion of arable land, lead to land degradation. However, climate change also contributes to this, particularly through:
Conversely, desertification also exacerbates climate change: The loss of vegetation leads to the greenhouse gases bound in it being released into the atmosphere, meaning carbon reserves are lost. Less vegetation also means that less CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere.
There is no single solution to soil degradation, says Funk. However, greening and ground cover can help. This protects the soil from erosion, rainfall can seep away better and evaporation is reduced by shading and reducing wind speed close to the ground.
Together with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the UNCCD is one of the Rio Conventions that were adopted following the Earth Summit in 1992. At the time, the UNCCD was seen in particular as an “African convention”; African countries hoped that it would provide them with funding to combat desertification – largely in vain. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the UNCCD, COP16 will be the largest UN land conference to date and the first UNCCD COP in the Middle East and North Africa region with first-hand knowledge of the impacts of desertification, land degradation, and droughts.
When the world’s heads of state and government negotiate the future of the planet in Azerbaijan these days, one of the largest economies will be excluded. Although Taiwan ranks 14th among the wealthiest countries in the world measured by average income per capita, Taiwan’s Environment Minister Peng Chi-ming and other government representatives have not been invited to the World Climate Summit. Only Taiwanese NGOs are allowed to attend the summit as observers.
Despite the exclusion, Taiwan follows the COP29 virtually. The Taiwanese Ministry of the Environment has set up a special “war room” where Minister Peng and his department heads follow the negotiations every evening. Interested citizens can watch the livestream on Facebook, while Taiwanese NGO representatives are connected directly from Baku and share the latest information.
As a trained meteorologist and entrepreneur, Peng has personally attended eleven COP summits. Table.Briefings met the minister last week in Taipei during a talk with international media. Peng is clearly aware of the urgency of the climate issue for Taiwan.
As a subtropical island, Taiwan is already severely affected by the effects of climate change. Peng expects temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius in summer to be the norm in just ten years. He stresses that Taiwan is increasingly characterized by extreme weather, with devastating typhoons on the one hand and periods of drought on the other. “In Taiwan, we have a love-hate relationship with typhoons. They bring important water resources, but they also claim lives every time,” he explains.
These effects already have an economic impact on every single citizen through so-called “green inflation.” “This is not necessarily triggered by the levying of CO2 charges; it also happens that a typhoon destroys our crops and causes prices to skyrocket.”
The spread of infectious diseases such as dengue fever illustrates Taiwan’s climate vulnerability. Once confined to the south, the mosquito-borne disease increasingly appears in northern Taiwan. “We expect dengue fever to spread further north from Southeast Asia in the future and possibly also reach Japan,” says Peng.
Although Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations, the country is voluntarily abiding by the guidelines of the World Climate Conference. “Taiwan will never be number one in climate action, but we want to catch up quickly,” emphasizes Peng. In 2015, Taiwan set itself the goal of cutting CO2 emissions by 50 percent until 2050. Last year, the parliament passed a law to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
An important step in this direction is the introduction of the “Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange,” a platform for trading emissions credits, launched last month. From 2026, a CO2 levy of 300 Taiwan dollars per ton will also apply to companies emitting more than 25,000 tons of CO2 annually. That is the equivalent of 8.75 euros. The calculation is based on the previous year’s emissions.
In this context, Minister Peng expressed his gratitude for the good cooperation with the Federal Republic of Germany. “Over the past seven years, Germany has supported Taiwan in many ways, for example, by training colleagues in the field of emissions trading. Germany has helped us considerably here,” Peng told Table.Briefings. The minister had visited Germany as recently as September last year. “I hope to lead a delegation to Germany again next year, as the emissions trading scheme will be an indispensable part of Taiwan’s environmental policy,” he added.
Last week, Udo Philipp, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, was also a guest in Taipei. Philipp and Peng had already met in Germany last year. The State Secretary attended two German-Taiwanese economic cooperation and trade policy conferences and visited the semiconductor manufacturer TSMC in Hsinchu.
Germany welcomes the new TSMC plant in Dresden but also has some reservations, for example, regarding water and electricity consumption and environmental standards, explains Peng. “As Environment Minister, I have explained our position on TSMC. It reassured the Germans to hear first-hand that TSMC’s environmental standards are high.” He added that the exchange with Germany was extremely close.
Another government focus is the creation of a green growth fund worth 100 billion Taiwan dollars (around three billion euros). This fund is intended to support companies active in net zero emissions, the circular economy and other environmentally related projects.
Despite all efforts in emissions trading and green growth, Taiwan’s energy mix remains dominated by fossil fuels; coal and LNG accounted for almost 82 percent of electricity production last year. By 2030, the country aims to obtain 30 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, compared to currently just 9.5 percent. The expansion of wind energy is progressing slowly.
For the future, Peng envisions connecting Taiwan to international power grids. He points to Singapore, which plans to import green electricity from Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia via new undersea cables over the next few years, as it lacks land for solar and wind energy.
As an island that has to import 96.7 percent of its energy sources (including fuel), Taiwan is particularly vulnerable to geopolitical risks, such as a possible blockade by China. While Taiwan’s last nuclear reactor will be decommissioned in May next year, the public debate on nuclear power is still ongoing. Prime Minister Cho Jung-tai recently emphasized that Taiwan is open to using new nuclear technologies to meet the growing energy needs of the semiconductor and AI industries. David Demes
