This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Some 50 miles southwest of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, and strategically located close to a cluster of the island’s top universities, the 3,500-acre Hsinchu Science Park is globally celebrated as the incubator of Taiwan’s most successful technology companies. It opened in 1980, the government having acquired the land and cleared the rice fields,with the aim of creating a technology hub that would combine advanced research and industrial production.
Today Taiwan’s science parks house more than 1,100 companies, employ 321,000 people, and generate $127 billion in annual revenue. Along the way, Hsinchu Science Park’s Industrial Technology Research