Air pollution in ROK

 

Hello, ambassadors and all the eco-generation members. This is the ambassador of South Korea, ChaeYun CHO. I'm so pleased to write the first article for my 15^th ambassador program. For today's article, I would like to discuss the air pollution in Republic of Korea, where I live and represent.

Before we talk about the environment of South Korea, let's discuss the basic backgrounds. Korea is located in the North East Asia. Korea has temperate climate, thus, we have four seasons spring, summer, fall, and winter.

In about 1960s, Korea was very poor and undeveloped because we had Korean War. However, since then, we have achieved rapid development and reached at this point. Because of its development, we are called 'the miracle of Han River'. Economically, we had a great accomplishment, however, environmentally side effects have been rising as a integral problem.

So, above those environmental issues, I would like to discuss the air pollution as we are to discuss it for the first month. Personally, I believe it is such a great policy to have common topic since we can compare it from country to country. Well, anyway, I will discuss the air pollution in Korea.

 

So let's look at the map below. The map is from aqicn.org (World Air Quality Index) which is a project started in 2007. The map shows the air quality information from all over the world in real-time. Its mission is to promote Air Pollution awareness and provide a unified Air Quality information, for the whole world, in real-time. So below is the world map showing the Air pollution status.

So the color of the index represents above.

 

By magnifying, we can see Korea's air pollution status. Except for some few cities, most of the regions were showing 'good' and 'moderate'. It was a little but surprising since I did not expect it to be that good. Well, but Korea needs more effort on preserving air, and I hope all region can reach 'good'.

If we talk about air pollution, Korea cannot miss yellow dust. The ultrafine dust blows from China and Mongolia and it affects us every spring. Therefore, we are cooperating to reduce it. For instance, Korea has been supporting China for planting trees there. Moreover, we are having joint project, studying it. Yellow dust is huge problem we face every spring, thus should be reduced a lot.

Air is the thing that does not have exact boundary. It is circulating every time and thus, I believe that world-cooperation is needed for solving this problem. 

Thanks for reading.