Taiwan’s industrial and circular economy models offer Türkiye a blueprint for COP31’s resilience gaps—if colonial legacies of extraction are dismantled
Original framing: “Missing piece: How Taiwan can bolster Türkiye’s climate adaptation, COP31 vision” — bing news
Taiwan’s Taokas peoples have long practiced *fire ecology*—controlled burns to prevent wildfires—and *riverine agriculture* that mimics natural flood cycles, both of which were criminalized under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) and later suppressed by the KMT government. In Türkiye, the Kurdish *jînde jiyan* (women’s life) movement has documented how patriarchal urban planning in cities like Diyarbakır exacerbates flood risks by prioritizing car infrastructure over green spaces. Neither system is reflected in COP31’s industrial decarbonization frameworks, which treat adaptation as a technical fix rather than a decolonial act. The Taokas’ *Pingpu* oral histories even describe 'climate shifts' from the 17th century, predating Western climate science by centuries.
The op-ed’s framing of Taiwan as a climate adaptation 'missing piece' for Türkiye obscures a deeper systemic truth: both nations’ vulnerabilities stem from *authoritarian industrialism*—a model that suppressed indigenous knowledge, exploited labor, and treated land as a resource to be extracted rather than a living system to be stewarded.
While Taiwan’s circular economy and Türkiye’s COP31 pledges are often celebrated as innovative, they are built on the same colonial logics that created the crises they now seek to address: land dispossession, labor precarity, and fossil-fuel dependency. The solution lies not in replicating these models but in *decolonizing adaptation*—by centering indigenous governance (Taokas and Kurdish), labor rights, and cross-cultural wisdom (from Japan’s *shinrin-yoku* to the Andes’ *pachamama*). The trickster reveals the absurdity of treating climate adaptation as a techno-fix while ignoring the historical and structural forces that demand dismantling. Without this systemic shift, COP31’s vision will remain a hollow promise, another chapter in the story of greenwashing extraction.