Sustainable indicators for strategic environmental assessment in Taiwan

The legislation and implementation of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) in Taiwan are currently at an early stage. As the legal system for SEA in Taiwan needs to be improved in many aspects, it was argued that the scope of policies should be expanded; the SEA review committee should be promoted; a retroactive mechanism for SEA needs to be implemented; and indicators for sustainable development should be incorporated. Based on the Policy Environmental Assessment Act promulgated in 2001, eleven items of policies are required to conduct SEA. It was also regulated that the environmental impacts of the policies should be assessed by employing an impact matrix, i.e., an indicator system that contains 8 components, 24 corresponding indicators and over 50 assessment items (variables). For each of the indicators, its significances in the regional, national, and global level were valued as an integer score between -2 to +2. Thus, the environmental impacts in terms of the 8 components, i.e., carrying capacity of the environment, natural ecological system, public health and safety, natural resource use, water resources and their uses, the cultural assets and harmony of natural landscapes, international environmental rules, and others, can be demonstrated for further evaluation or discussion. These three-tier indicator system needs to be reconstructed according to comprehensive revision of the SEA framework to make it fit to the essential criterion of a SEA system, namely ability of supporting sustainable development, to a higher extent.