In a small Asian island nation, the seeds for a major climate-themed literary revolution in world literature and cinema were sown in 2011 when a new literary term ''cli-fi" (short for ''climate change science fiction'') was coined.
Since then the term has caught on worldwide, with novelists and literary critics in dozens of countries latching on to the new term and placing it front and center in hundreds of newspaper articles and academic papers published in English and other languages. It's true:the eye-catching now-famous 5-letter literary buzzword was created in a nation known more for its noodles and potstickers than its literary culture and the term has exploded across the media world since its inception and initial promotion nearly ten years ago.
It wasn't a government project and it didn't have the sponsorship of a major university on the island or any think tank. It was created by a retired newspaper man noodling around one day with his pen and a piece of paper at a sidewalk noodle shop in a small rural town in the southern part of the island where the climate is subtropical and balmy.
Welcome to Taiwan where cli-fi was born, refined and passionately promoted by an internet warrior with a yen to make a difference and step up the world's fight against climate indifference. Yes, cli-fi was created to warn against climate apathy .
In related news, a group of government, academic and industry professionals on the island have recently called on leaders to prepare for the effects of climate change islandwide.
If the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide continues to increase at its current pace, it would exceed 450 parts per million by 2036, causing a rise of 2°C in global temperatures, the group of disaster prevention experts from industry, government and academia said.
Calling it an emergency is not meant to invoke fear, but is intended to highlight the need for early preparation for global warming, otherwise the nation could be caught in severe problems it would be unable to fix, they said.
That is why leaders should propose strategies, one of which should be to integrate disaster prevention systems across all governmental levels, association director Peng Chi-ming said.
Climate change would affect our industries, National Chiao Tung University civil engineering professor Shan Hsin-yu said.
As the nation relies heavily on energy imports, the government should find ways to encourage reduced consumption of energy resources.
“This nation is no longer a frog sitting in tepid water, the water is already boiling,” Shan said.
The nation must admit that measures taken up to this point to combat global warming are no longer enough to limit its changes, and Taiwan lacks a climate vision, unlike its neighbors, Ming Chuan University architecture professor Wang Jieh-jiuh said.
Japan proposed a nationwide disaster prevention project in 2013, Wang said.
UN data show that Taiwan faces some of the highest risks of climate change consequences, said Yao Ta-chun, chief executive of Eos Rhea Metis, a corporate and engineering risk management consulting firm.
The government should respond to the association’s statement and mobilize all parts of society to minimize losses, Yao said.
The group’s statement asked for four actions from the government: First, it should set clear carbon-reduction goals.
Second, the government should integrate its disaster prevention systems across all levels, and introduce a complete set of disaster prevention laws and plans, it said.
Third, it should open communication channels between it and the private sector to ensure better coordination and distribution of work, the statement said.
Last, more resources must be devoted to medium and long-term solutions, such as creating a green supply chain, mitigating the impact on global supply chains and turning the crisis into a new opportunity, it added.
So yes, there is a burning need for climate action
While much of the media’s attention has been on next elections, Beijing’s manipulation efforts and the protests racking Hong Kong, the Disaster Prevention Industry Association yesterday chose to focus on the bigger picture, with a grim prognostication for the nation this year regardless of which political party is in power come in the future.
Calling it an emergency is not meant to invoke fear, but is intended to highlight the need for early preparation for global warming, otherwise the nation could be caught in severe problems it would be unable to fix, they said.
That is why leaders should propose strategies, one of which should be to integrate disaster prevention systems across all governmental levels, association director Peng Chi-ming said.
Climate change would affect our industries, National Chiao Tung University civil engineering professor Shan Hsin-yu said.
As the nation relies heavily on energy imports, the government should find ways to encourage reduced consumption of energy resources.
“This nation is no longer a frog sitting in tepid water, the water is already boiling,” Shan said.
The nation must admit that measures taken up to this point to combat global warming are no longer enough to limit its changes, and Taiwan lacks a climate vision, unlike its neighbors, Ming Chuan University architecture professor Wang Jieh-jiuh said.
Japan proposed a nationwide disaster prevention project in 2013, Wang said.
UN data show that Taiwan faces some of the highest risks of climate change consequences, said Yao Ta-chun, chief executive of Eos Rhea Metis, a corporate and engineering risk management consulting firm.
The government should respond to the association’s statement and mobilize all parts of society to minimize losses, Yao said.
The group’s statement asked for four actions from the government: First, it should set clear carbon-reduction goals.
Second, the government should integrate its disaster prevention systems across all levels, and introduce a complete set of disaster prevention laws and plans, it said.
Third, it should open communication channels between it and the private sector to ensure better coordination and distribution of work, the statement said.
Last, more resources must be devoted to medium and long-term solutions, such as creating a green supply chain, mitigating the impact on global supply chains and turning the crisis into a new opportunity, it added.
So yes, there is a burning need for climate action
While much of the media’s attention has been on next elections, Beijing’s manipulation efforts and the protests racking Hong Kong, the Disaster Prevention Industry Association yesterday chose to focus on the bigger picture, with a grim prognostication for the nation this year regardless of which political party is in power come in the future.
As of this year, Taiwan has officially entered ''a climate emergency,'' the association said.
It cited the Oxford Dictionaries’ choice of the term — defined as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it” — as its word of the year for last year.
The association’s warning comes just over six months after more than 30 groups marched in Taipei calling on the government to declare a climate emergency and urging politicians to pay more attention to climate issues that pose a threat to national security.
Given the scope of climate disasters facing two other nations in the region — the raging bushfires in Australia that have so far consumed at least 5 million hectares, killed an estimated half-billion native animals and almost a score of people, and the widescale flooding in Jakarta this week that has killed at least an equal number of people — it might be tempting to dismiss the association’s declaration on Taiwan as crying wolf.
However, it is exactly the scope of those disasters that makes it essential for Taiwanese to heed the association’s warning, for as several of its members said, despite all of the attention on international efforts to reduce carbon emissions and the debate over the cause and effect of global warming, many nations are failing to ensure that disaster prevention efforts are keeping pace with a rapidly changing climate.
The Environmental Protection Administration, in a press release on Nov. 13 last year, said that the government had created a National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan aimed at responding to eight aspects of climate change, but since the headline was “Taiwan can be a valuable partner in the global response to climate change,” cynics might question whether the action plan was little more than a public relations effort.
The association certainly seems to believe that the government should do more.
It urged the government to take more concrete measures by establishing a carbon reduction plan and long-term carbon neutrality goals, creating a national land plan that could respond to climate risks, building a complete disaster prevention legal system, and creating a mechanism to integrate the disaster prevention units of ministries and departments.
While the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said that the monsoon rain that fell on Tuesday — the most in a single day in more than two decades — was “not ordinary rain,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo blamed delays in flood-control infrastructure projects for the severity of Jakarta’s flooding.
A 2018 report by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said that as spring rainfall has declined in recent decades, extreme heat events have become more common and droughts more severe, leading to a greater number of days with very high fire dangers, but the country’s top leaders have continued to downplay the dangers posed by climate change, just as they earlier dismissed the need to boost national defenses against bushfires and other natural disasters.
Tuesday closed out Australia’s hottest-ever decade, the same day that the Central Weather Bureau announced that Taiwan last year saw its highest average temperature on record since 1947, 24.56°C.
While some of that heat should be turned on national leaders who place more value on economic growth than natural systems and the global environment, the public must realize that the time for complacency is long past.
It cited the Oxford Dictionaries’ choice of the term — defined as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it” — as its word of the year for last year.
The association’s warning comes just over six months after more than 30 groups marched in Taipei calling on the government to declare a climate emergency and urging politicians to pay more attention to climate issues that pose a threat to national security.
Given the scope of climate disasters facing two other nations in the region — the raging bushfires in Australia that have so far consumed at least 5 million hectares, killed an estimated half-billion native animals and almost a score of people, and the widescale flooding in Jakarta this week that has killed at least an equal number of people — it might be tempting to dismiss the association’s declaration on Taiwan as crying wolf.
However, it is exactly the scope of those disasters that makes it essential for Taiwanese to heed the association’s warning, for as several of its members said, despite all of the attention on international efforts to reduce carbon emissions and the debate over the cause and effect of global warming, many nations are failing to ensure that disaster prevention efforts are keeping pace with a rapidly changing climate.
The Environmental Protection Administration, in a press release on Nov. 13 last year, said that the government had created a National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan aimed at responding to eight aspects of climate change, but since the headline was “Taiwan can be a valuable partner in the global response to climate change,” cynics might question whether the action plan was little more than a public relations effort.
The association certainly seems to believe that the government should do more.
It urged the government to take more concrete measures by establishing a carbon reduction plan and long-term carbon neutrality goals, creating a national land plan that could respond to climate risks, building a complete disaster prevention legal system, and creating a mechanism to integrate the disaster prevention units of ministries and departments.
While the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said that the monsoon rain that fell on Tuesday — the most in a single day in more than two decades — was “not ordinary rain,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo blamed delays in flood-control infrastructure projects for the severity of Jakarta’s flooding.
A 2018 report by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said that as spring rainfall has declined in recent decades, extreme heat events have become more common and droughts more severe, leading to a greater number of days with very high fire dangers, but the country’s top leaders have continued to downplay the dangers posed by climate change, just as they earlier dismissed the need to boost national defenses against bushfires and other natural disasters.
Tuesday closed out Australia’s hottest-ever decade, the same day that the Central Weather Bureau announced that Taiwan last year saw its highest average temperature on record since 1947, 24.56°C.
While some of that heat should be turned on national leaders who place more value on economic growth than natural systems and the global environment, the public must realize that the time for complacency is long past.
Via THE ''Cli-Fi ''REPORT:
100 academic and media links:
http://cli-fi.net
Why do we need cli-fi ? A term coined in 2011 via The Cli-Fi Report.
Because we need to think about the future
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