Maintaining a certain amount of agricultural land and promoting its agricultural land utilization efficiency is essential in a country. Many innovative strategies for adapting to climate change have been implemented in developed countries. To achieve the goal of climate change adaptation for agricultural land, a vulnerability assessment of farmland is indispensable. Based on the research framework of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this study applied the structure of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptation to build criteria and conduct an evaluation of a designated area in Southern Taiwan. We identified the key factors of the vulnerability of farmland, through mapping with spatial analysis, and by using geographic information system tools. The main purpose of the application of a vulnerability assessment is not to explicitly describe the status of agricultural land to climate change, but to help local government and farmers to identify the critical area, and to discuss the appropriated adaptive policies. According to the results of the vulnerability assessment of agricultural land, the entire study region can be divided into three patterns: Pattern 1, located in the western coastal zone, filled with various attributes of high vulnerability; Pattern 2, distributed on the central plain region in the east, with complete blocks of agricultural land and low vulnerability; and Pattern 3, located in the central plain region to the west, a region in which areas with various vulnerability levels. The following three types of adaptation strategies for climate change for farmland were established: (1) the enhancement of agricultural production, (2) the maintenance of agricultural production, and (3) the conservation of the agricultural environment. The current results can serve as valuable guidelines for governments to implement feasible local adaptation strategies in the future.

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.