Towards a More Comprehensive Environmental Impact Assessment on Post-Earthquake Recovery: Lessons in Taiwan

The central mountain chain, as the name shows, is located in the central part of Taiwan and divides the island into two parts. This makes transportation between Eastern and Western part of Taiwan become very costly and time-consuming. Taiwanese governments, therefore, build a Central Cross-Island Highway in 1956 to overcome this nature barrier, which enlarges the economic development areas among these mountain areas and hugely changes the local landscape and ecological environment. However, with the major earthquake hit in September 21^st, 1999, this mountain highway had been severely damaged. Taiwanese government rebuild soon after the earthquake, however, when the typhoon Mindulle struck Taiwan in 2004 and ruined the highway once again. The re-reconstruction of this highway becomes a high profile social issue debating the value among environmental protection, engineering cost of re-reconstruction, and how to save local people’s life and living. So, this paper try to develop a social and environment impact analytical framework, which uses public choice theory into the framework for enlarging the perspective of impact assessment and increasing policy feasibility.