Review the secession and evolution of Taiwan’s national environmental policies and put it in context with international and historical trends, we understand that now Taiwan is at a critical point of environmental policy transformation. Through out the world, every country’s environmental policy and environmental organizations are established in the face of environmental accidents or disasters. Then the environmental organizations were set to prevent and control pollutions; and natural conservation bureau to conserve and protect natural diversity and resources. Taiwan is one of the cases. Twenty years ago the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) of Executive Yuan was established which integrated pollution control operations that had been scattered around different bureaus. From then on, the environment improves for we have a central unit of environmental protection. However the job has never been finished. While sustainable development (SD) been mainstreamed the same year EPA was set, the idea of SD which emphasize integration of environment, society and economy was only started in Taiwan. And we are still on the way to advance from end-of- pipe thinking to pollution prevention and source-reduction. Therefore, in this report we propose that the future trends of Taiwan’s environmental policy should aims for three goals: the short term goal is to strengthen pollution control through prevention and source-reduction while integrate the now dispersed natural conservation operations; the mid term goal is to integrate environmental affairs as a whole, combine pollution control and natural protection into one arm; the third and final goal is to integrate environmental thinking into social and economic affairs, which in our view the way to sustainable development. To supplement these three goals we also produce four visions which visualize what we see as a sustainable future: high quality of living environment; sustainable natural resources; environmental friendly production and consumption; and civil participatory society. Five priority strategies which we think would help reach these goals are also proposed: 1) strengthen pollution control; 2) promote sound material cycle society; 3) encourage green house gas reduction; 4) improve policy environmental assess and review mechanism; 5) organization restructure or reorganize suggestions. Through these five strategies, we think the EAP could on the one hand strengthen their core function of pollution control and environmental assessment, and on the other hand promote integration of environmental business as a whole through proposing organization restructure; while promoting SD through cooperation with economic and social departments on issue of climate change and cycle society.

Policy Succession, Policy Analysis, Policy Planning