To assist and speed up river pollution cleanup in the Great Tainan Area, River Restoration Center in Chang Jung University has conducted a series of public participation projects since 2002 under the sponsor of Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration. Unlike the previous years in which the River Restoration Center directly coordinated River Watch activities to involve people in schools, communities, and environmental NGOs, since year 2006, we emphasized our roles on assistance and tool development. The tasks we focused this year included: (1) assisting Environmental Protection Bureaus of Tainan County and Tainan City in training and organizing their River Watch programs; (2) promoting environmental education for river restoration; (3) carrying out a River Volunteer Convention for seven counties in the Southern Taiwan; (4) holding Counselling and Oversee meetings to involve public opinions toward Erhjin River and Yenshui River cleanup; (5) maintaining the ‘River Information Network for the Great Tainan Area’ website. The whole series of public participation projects have established a mechanism to involve people in river pollution cleanup projects. Illegal wastewater discharges were better controlled by promoting River Watch activities, strengthening the reporting system, improving communication between river volunteers and environmental inspectors. Due to our successfulness, this public participation model has been adopted by Environmental Protection Bureaus nationwide. To provide our experience and tools developed over the past five years for other River Watch programs, we established and maintained a public participation website (River Information Network for the Great Tainan Area), held seed teacher training workshops, and participated to numerous promoting acitivities in schools and townhall meetings in this year’s project. We also further promote the river environmental education, Water Environment Patch Project, to 15 elementary and jounior-high schools across the Great Tainan Area. To involve the delegates of the River Watch groups into the watershed management planning, we have also held routine Counselling and Oversee meetins to discuss the watershed environmental issues. Through the processes, we have promoted the concept of river patrolling by bicycling, formed a water environmental education alliance, restoring the Nanting Bridge electrical waste contaminated site to a natural wetland, and executived a cooperative supervision to ensure that the disposals of historical electrical waste digging up by the river bank construction project are in environemtally sound manners.

Public Participation, Volunteer Monitoring Program, River Watch