Strategies for Promoting Sustainable Development of Land and Water Resources in a Land Subsidence Affected Area of Taiwan

ABSTRACT Land subsidence has been observed in many parts of the world. In Taiwan, the main cause is the excessive extraction of groundwater in alluvial plains. For limited land and water resources, it is essential to balance the development among economics, society and conservation issues in land subsidence‐affected areas. The Taiwan government promotes ‘prevention (non‐engineering)’ and ‘reclamation (engineering)’ strategies since the 1980s, which are to increase surface and alternative water supply, decrease groundwater abstraction, strengthen groundwater recharge, enhance enforcement related to water resources utilization and management, reduce induced disasters and encourage public participation. This paper reports the framework of prevention and reclamation strategies and their relative achievements; furthermore, it recently integrated ICT technology with low‐cost devices to monitor the regional pumping behaviour related to land subsidence for groundwater management. The real‐time monitoring system enables the utilization of groundwater more effectively and sustainably in reducing land subsidence. In 2022, according to the delimited goals of each strategy in every phase, all achievements were effective in mitigating the annual subsiding rate and affected area, the former from over 20 cm/year down to 8 cm/year, the latter from 1616 to 310 km 2 .