Environment Pollution and Climate Change
Open Access

Abstract

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) lacks both technical capacity and knowledge to survey environmental problems. Recently, the DPRK has been opening to certain international environmental issues such as biodiversity, wetland protection, sustainable forest management, and agroforestry. In this study, we analysed recent DPRK’s international environmental cooperation for developing technical capacity. DPRK started projects with various international organisations including Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International for building plant protection capacity, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in collaboration with World Agroforestry Centre in China for sloping land management and agroforestry, International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements for building capacity for organic agriculture development and Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF) for improvement of rural living conditions through healthy forests and biodiversity. The international cooperation projects have been successfully introduced in model sites throughout several provinces of DPRK. It also increases the political support and concern of the DPRK government. Especially, HSF’s model site, Daedong-Gun, South Pyongan province in DPRK shows that the forest area in 2017 was increased and reduced their rate of loss, while in DPRK, severe forest fires have exacerbated the loss of forest. It appears the model site has a great possibility to prevent deforestation at local level. However, large scale restoration is required to restore the degraded land and environment in DPRK. To implement it on a larger scale, cooperation with international organizations and non-governmental organizations would be necessary.

Biography

Hyun-Ah CHOI has completed her PhD from Korea University. She is currently a Reseacher at Hanns Seidel Foundation in Republic of Korea, based in Seoul, consulting NGOs, academic and public institutions in questions of unification and inter-Korean environment cooperation. She also works on sustainable development issues in the inner-Korean border area and from 2015 participates the survey as an Expert. Her research interests include international environment cooperation and ecosytem services assessment. Her publications include reserah articles in international journals like Journal of Forestry Research, Sustaniablity, Advances in Space Research and Journal of Plant Biology.

E-mail: hachoi@hss.or.kr