Climate change and population growth are increasing the frequency of flooding and drought, resulting in conflict over water resources. Social impact assessments (SIA) of the allocation and management of water resources provide a way of reducing and resolving such conflicts. This article first explores the nature of SIA for water environments through an inductive analysis of the cases mentioned in more than 30 papers. Next, it identifies important advantages of SIA over integrated water resources management (IWRM) practices and indicates that while IWRM solves water-related issues to improve social well-being, it cannot entirely grasp the overall social impact of planned interventions. Following this, it analyzes the water environment governance structures in Taiwan, using questionnaire responses from water environment management professionals to discuss challenges of effectively implementing water environment SIA. The questionnaire covers 26 detailed tasks of SIA advocated by Vanclay et al. This research is the first to have evaluated the difficulty of the tasks. The survey results can be used as a reference for the implementation of SIA in other regions. The results show that (1) the water environment SIA is indeed necessary; (2) Taiwan’s water environment professionals need to improve from their current lack of understanding of SIA; (3) it is difficult to implement the water environment SIA; (4) it is necessary for SIA to clarify and integrate the authorities and responsibilities of relevant government departments; (5) the professionals believe the myth of quantification of SIA; and (6) water environment SIA must be integrated with the existing IWRM. Finally, we emphasize the need to integrate SIA and IWRM in a mutually complementary way, and illuminate the need for an integrated SIA framework for water environment management.

Climate change research has emerged over the past few decades as a vibrant field of inquiry with significant impact on society, economics and politics. Analysing the context of past climate change research is necessary to check progress, gaps, needs and to optimise the benefits of future development. This paper analyses nearly 6000 government-funded climate change research projects in Taiwan from 1993 to 2020 based on data in Government Research Bulletin (GRB), supplemented by reviewing Taiwan’s science and technology policies to obtain a constructive research discourse. While the Taiwan government has continued to actively promote climate change research following the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), it suffers from uneven development of research fields, lack of social and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary research, and a gap between scientific research and decision-making. While these individual issues can be addressed, they stem from a core factor: the lack of determination and commitment of politicians and government to implement recommended mitigation/adaptation policies. This is one of very few papers investigating climate change research from a national perspective and the first focusing on Taiwan, and is of potential interest to researchers, policymakers and members of the general public concerned about national-scale climate change research.