Green Citizens' Action Alliance
台灣檔案-水環境-p2-德基水庫3
攝影: 柯金源 老師
INTRO
Founded in 2000, Green Citizens’ Action Alliance(GCAA) is a non-governmental organization focusing on energy and environmental issues nationwide. GCAA aims to broaden public participation through issue-based coalitions, social networks, and citizen action, and achieve the goal of sustainable lifestyles and environmental protection under the precondition of ensuring the voices of the vulnerable are heard.
The Alliance has long been monitoring and researching different energy issues, including nuclear energy, and building consensus between different stakeholders of energy policy. It has brought togerher international experience and domestic consensus on energy policy to provide the government with practical policy proposals, create a blueprint for Taiwan’s medium-to long-term energy transition, and advocate for a sustainable society completely powered by renewable energy. GCAA has organized National Nuclear Abolition Action Platform (NNAAP) and Citizen Energy Transition Alliance (CETA), which were founded in 2011 and 2015 respectively. More than 30 organizations from different regions were mobilized by GCAA to participate in the two alliances. GCAA plays the role of engaging and facilitating various stakeholders together.
Recently, the alliance has been promoting its interactive website called “Thau Bing” that systematicallt records, charts, and visualizes pollution records of enterprises — one of the few projects in Asia of its kind. The website not only enables citizens to monitor pollution, but also enhances government transparency.
Nuclear Film Festival
Being held biannually since 2013, Nuclear Film Festival is the sole film event in Taiwan with an exclusive focus on a nuclear-free world and energy related issues.
The festival initially consisted of themes such as uranium mining, nuclear safety, nuclear disaster and nuclear disposal. Over the past several years, we further incorporated films concerning climate change, air pollution and controversies over fossil fuels development, etc. into the biannual gathering in order to keep abreast of latest development in climate and energy.
In addition to documentaries, the films selected include a wide array of genres such as experimental cinemas, animations, fictions in order to reach out to new audiences. We strive to create space for in-depth and thought provoking discussions on energy related issues while compelling viewers to imagine and grasp the intersection of energy, society, politics, history and human rights.
Through aesthetic engagement with rarely heard narratives and rarely seen visual imagery, the film festival makes energy-related issues easily accessible and relatable to a wider public. Those films resonate with a plurality of viewers who had previously found the world of nuclear power and energy too technically difficult and too specialized to comprehend.
Over the past several years, each Nuclear Film Festival attracted more than one thousand five hundred viewers. Seeing films as means to spark debates and provoke action, we continue to organize a series of localized films showing events and panel discussions upon the requests by various communities, schools, universities, bookstores and coffee shops across Taiwan right after the end of each film festival. Those events have many resonances among students, youth and concerned citizens. Thus far, there are more than five hundred such events taking place.
Net-Zero Transition
Electricity illuminates human civilizations and precipitates the process of social development. The heavy reliance of the world economy on fossil fuels over the past century, however, has led to continued rises in greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated the deterioration of air quality.
With an energy self-sufficiency rate of mere two per cent and a heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels, Taiwan has propped up industrial development and commenced by artificially suppressing utility prices. In the meantime, this development model has taken a heavy toll on public health and ecology.
Over-reliance on the large-scale generation of electricity at centralized power plants not only makes us more vulnerable to increasingly extreme weather events that have become the new normal but also weakens citizen-led electricity initiatives. Energy transition must not be reduced to a mere transition away from fossil fuels, the former should be correctly understood as a process of social transformation.
We campaign for energy transition with three visions in mind. These are sustainability, democracy and justice. We strive to keep energy use more in line with low-carbon schemes and environmental sustainability. In this way, the process of energy development would constitute an essential part of democratic governance, and a more even distribution of energy resources among users could lay the basis for social justice.
Thaubing(transparent) Footprint
The project of Thaubing Footprints is a real-time, web-based monitoring system of industrial emissions. It is intended to equip consumers and concerned citizens of Taiwan with real-time activity data so that the public can play a role in fostering transparency and accountability in industrial production.
Backed by data as well as independent and evidence-based analyses, the project lays a foundation for bringing together governments of various levels, corporations and the general public to conduct meaningful dialogues and for taking action to close regulatory loopholes.
We aim to address environmental issues through actively proposing amendments to existing regulations and raising awareness about citizens’ right to participate and to know, especially how ordinary people can take back control as concerned citizens and consumers through making more environmentally conscious and socially aware purchases, and how the public can bring influence to bear on responsible production.
We strive to wean Taiwan off its pollution and energy intensive model of economic development while finding a way to sustainable development through bold, collaborative and concerted efforts.