Abstract 

How to effectively manage livestock wastewater is the main focus of this project. Yet livestock wastewater is not only the major cause of river pollution in several agriculture-based counties in Taiwan since the 1970s. How to redefine its role, not as waste but as resource, might offer alternative solution to many unsustainable issues in Taiwan. For instance, around 60% of water is used for agricultural irrigation purpose annually in Taiwan. While climate change might worsen problem of drought in the near future, how to effectively utilize livestock wastewater as irrigation water source can mitigate aquatic pollution issue and create co-benefits. Furthermore, combining with biogas production, we can formulate a closer food-water-energy nexus that is promoted in transdisciplinary sustainability science lately. In order to understand and speed up the application of livestock wastewater reuse and recycling, this research designs a comparative case study of four livestock farm-based counties in Taiwan. Through in-depth interview and focus group method, the study aims to explore potential challenges and opportunities faced by actors. This research also proposes to adopt a social-ecological system and adaptive management approach and emphasizes role of actor as the governing unit in adaptively and sustainably transforming livestock wastewater related social-ecological system.

Keywords: livestock wastewater, social-ecological system, adaptive management, river pollution, grey water

Abstract 

Taiwan experienced the worse drought in a hundred year in April, 2021. Taiwan government mobilized three water resources that were not commonly used in the past: 1) underground water at construction site 2) hyporheic flow 3) recycled wastewater. This water crisis can be regarded as a focusing event discussed in the public policy theory. Since the event’s sudden and unusual nature, it has potential to open policy window for provoking new policy tool to intervene the problematic. This project is not limited to explore and analyze the impact of 2021 Spring water crisis on Taiwan’s water resource governance related policy in the short and long term. The study also plans to adopt the emerging concept in sustainability science – telecoupling (Hull & Liu, 2018; Liu et al., 2013) to examine the domestic water use of the biggest metropolitan in southern Taiwan – Kaohsiung City for its close to 2.8 million population and the dynamic and interdependent relationship between human and nature. In other words, the project advocates that watershed or underground water resource is by nature a highly dynamic social-ecological ecosystem. It is not only sensitive to climate change (natural driver) but also is susceptible to cross administrative governance (human driver). Even the most integrated natural resource governance model – European Union Water Framework Directive is reminded by scientists to pay attention to the telecoupling effect or the underground water resource de- localizing effect (Luetkemeier et al., 2021). In the face of climate crisis, it is worthwhile to invest additional research resource to study the business-as-usual scenario and provide climate adaptation related urban water resource governance policy recommendation.

Keywords: telecoupling, urban water, social-ecological system, multilevel governance, de- localizing

Climate uncertainty has gradually entered human life, becoming an emergency response or even a new normal issue that both the public and private sectors have to cope with. This project will focus on water resources competition and conflicts in Taiwan. Although climate change is only a prelude in Taiwan, there have been no large-scale water resource competitions and conflicts in Taiwan after modernization. According to the predictions of scholars from various countries in the extant literature, small disputes that seem to be small in scale and can be temporarily quelled by monetary subsidies, including large-scale short-term subsidies for farmers forced to fallow or rotate crops due to the unprecedent drought in 2021, might snowball into non-temporary or scaled-up violent conflicts that can no longer be tolerated. This research project is in line with the key research topic C of the NSTC Sustainable Science discipline on water resources, including C1 sustainable development of watershed environment and C2 resilient water resources and especially SDG 6 to ensure that all people can enjoy water and its sustainable management, SDG 11 sustainable cities and SDG 16 for building a peaceful, just and strong institutions. This project will focus on examining disputes among various stakeholders in one of the Water Resource Agency's 2022 advance deployment “Pearl String Project”to strengthen water sending/receiving in western Taiwan - "transbasin water transfer from Nanshi Creek to Shimen Reservoir" by using the latest metacoupling theory to analyze the social-ecological system relationship of each sub-system in the water diversion area and the interaction between human and non-human. During the research process, we will also actively develop different public participation spaces where stakeholders can co-produce decisions together. The study site of this empirical research is also within the Long-term Socio-Ecological Research Feitsui core monitoring station (LTSER Feitsui), and it is expected to contribute research data and policy recommendations to the longterm monitoring station.

Water stress has been a major concern across the world as the unavailability of clean and safe drinking water can affect the basic sustenance of human life. With population explosion, rapid urbanization, and limited availability of water, many urban areas across the globe have been grappling with the water crisis. In recent times, climate change has worsened this problem by imposing the paradoxical phenomena of flash floods and droughts that challenge the availability of an already stressed natural resource. Needless to say, this problem needs to be addressed urgently, efficiently, and paying focal attention to the idea of water sustainability. Identifying appropriate solutions to this problem would require coordinated efforts from people, civil societies, policymakers, and governments in keeping with existing infrastructure and local environmental concerns. Hence, our India-Taiwan collaboration project attempts to apply the socio-hydrological systems approach to evaluate the existing water stress scenarios and design water sustainability for future research agenda and policy recommendation for the respective study sites: Bangalore in India, and Kaohsiung in Taiwan. Analytical methodologies we employ include sending-receiving-spillover water system analysis, coupled infrastructure system analysis, socio-economic analysis via surveys and in-depth interviews, hydrological modeling, and interaction and synthesis across our two study sites.

Our joint proposal is a highly interdisciplinary research project aiming at conserving and restoring ecosystem services (ES) for promoting biodiversity in Italy and in Taiwan sites by adopting the perspective of critical zone (CZ) processes involved in the terrestrial ecosystems functioning (Richter and Billings, 2015). In theory and in practice, healthy ecosystems are essential for the services they provide; while the welfare and living quality of humans also heavily depend on these uninterrupted provision of ecosystem services. As the World’s population continues to grow, its reliance on healthy ecosystems – able to provide unaltered goods and services – also increases. However, natural ecosystems are constantly threatened by ongoing climate change and anthropogenic impacts. Therefore, assessing their resilience to adverse conditions is essential to mitigate the negative impacts and to promote biodiversity recovery and protection (Ali et al., 2022).