Hyun-Ah CHOI
Hanns Seidel Foundation Korea, South Korea
Title: International cooperation for DPRK’s environmental restoration
Biography
Biography: Hyun-Ah CHOI
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.