North Korea’s ravaged forests and the South Koreans ready to replant them

The forest forms a dense wall that stretches up the mountains beside the winding road. We are in South Korea, on our way to the demilitarised zone (DMZ). The heavily mined buffer between South and North Korea – the world’s most militarised border – bisects the peninsula, stretching about 250km coast to coast. Due to the near absence of human activity in the DMZ, plants and wildlife have flourished here.

Scientists estimate, in fact, that the 4km-wide sliver of land is home to more than 5,000 animal and plant species, including rare mammals such as the Amur goral, Asiatic black bear and musk deer. According to South Korea’s Ministry of Environment, 106 DMZ species are protected or endangered, and it is even said that Amur leopards and Siberian tigers – some of the rarest creatures on the planet – have been spotted in the zone.

Away from the protection accidentally provided by the border tension, however, the Korean peninsula has experienced dramatic ecological degradation through the decades, and the difference today between North and South is striking.

Accounting for just over 100,000 of the peninsula’s total of 220,000 sq km, and with a population of 51 million – twice that of the North – affluent South Korea is significantly more densely inhabited than its politically isolated neighbour. Even so, while forests now cover 65 per cent of South Korea, the forested area of the North fell from 68 per cent in 1990 to 42 per cent in 2015, according to data from the World Bank.

And while that percentage is higher than the world average of 31 per cent (forest cover in the United States accounted for 34 per cent of all land in 2015; 59 per cent in Brazil; and just 22 per cent in China), what is shocking is the recent rate of depletion in North Korea. Nasa’s Land Cover and Land Use Change programme estimates that about 25 per cent – or close to 5 million acres – of North Korean forests disappeared between 1990 and 2005 alone, the highest rate of woodland depredation anywhere in East Asia during that period. And trees are still being felled.

Following a summit, held in April of this year, between the South’s President Moon Jae-in and the North’s dictatorial leader Kim Jong-un, Seoul indicated that, as a sign of goodwill, it would be willing help restore the North’s denuded forests. To do so, it would draw upon knowledge hard won in the successful rehabilitation of its own once-devastated landscape.

“We have to do it one step at a time,” says Jung Su-young, a researcher and specialist on plant species in and around the DMZ. Jung has worked for the Korea Forest Service (KFS) – a state-run body established in 1967 to reforest the then-degraded South Korean environment, and still responsible for maintaining its woodlands today – for 10 years.

“Replanting has to be done by knowledgeable people, who know which tree species will fit in different areas,” he says.