Technical Studies

atastrophic floods become a worldwide trend in the climate change era, and Taiwan can never be excluded from the global village. In the wakes of Typhoon Mindulle (2004) and Typhoon Kalmaegi (2005), the fear of catastrophic floods had not yet eased and then Typhoon Morakot battered and shattered southern Taiwan in Aug 2009. To cope with such a potential of devastating floods, strategies on the consequences of catastrophic floods have to be well discussed and prepared. This research project is aiming at the tendency of unavoidable and disastrous floods and trying to find appropriate counteractions in order to help mitigate and restore the devastated regions in Taiwan.

In this 2-year project incorporated with economic, technical and legislative issues, strategies concentrating on nonstructural measures and related international and domestic regimes in several developed countries like EU, US, UK, or France will be collected and analyzed for further discussion. Consequently, strategies that can be adopted by our country Republic of China, Taiwan will be drafted based on the above analyses. And then these strategies will be applied to Gaoping River basin devastated by Typhoon Morakot and analyzed due to economic and technical concerns. The project will also provide suggestion on legal reforms for coping with catastrophic floods in Taiwan.

Based on the observation of legal regimes in several developed countries, enforcing floodplain management with legislative approaches has been an important measure to improve existed flood insurance regimes since mitigation on flood damage can definitely lessen financial burdens for those flood insurance regimes. But sometimes establishing flood insurance regime has been impossible for some developed countries so regimes concerning floodplain management would be promulgated. This project has learned the above experiences and focuses on regimes and approaches related floodplain management in the first year, and consequently discuss measures and legal issues aiming at the establishment of flood insurance regimes.

In a nutshell, this project will combine experiences about floodplain management and flood insurance issues from several developed countries, and demonstrate drafted strategies by the application in Gaoping River basin in order to discuss the feasibility of drafted strategies, and finally provide suggestion on related legal reform. Due to the limitation of structural measures in flood control, this project may help our country to survive and restore from another potential catastrophic flood.