Hello, this is the ambassador for Paju, Korea. My main topic for articles was foot-and-mouth disease, and still it is. However, facing current environmental conditions in Korea, I thought I should cover bad current weather conditions and the consequences following.

As everyone knows, we?ve had lots of sudden heavy rainstorms this summer. It is usual to have rainy seasons during the summer; however, sudden ?pouring? of rain is quite unusual in South Korea. Many environmentalists point out climate change to be the reason for this happening. They said that due to the increase use of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas in nowadays, there is much more accumulation of such gases in the air. As imagined, these kinds of gases cause sudden rainstorms in South Korea recently.

Now let?s look over the devastations from such a tragic natural disaster. As everyone knows there happened landslides, inundation, power cut, water cut, and more on. Of many consequences, there happened to be much more serious landslides and inundation than the past. Many of the rivers and dams were flooded and faced erosion. Because of these, some bridges were almost about to collapse. Well, this tragic event on rivers are somehow mainly related to the governmental river working (4 rivers project) in recent days, according to many experts. This is because, to meet the dates, the government unreasonably made a progress just before the rainy seasons, and most importantly, broke the embankment. With this kind of unconditional situations, probably such devastations were unavoidable.

Moreover, we know that there have been different kinds of developments going on, destroying the nature. Most noticeably, people didn?t, or at least government and the developers, have not paid much attention on protecting our forests. In the past, after the War, South Korea had put much effort on planting trees. Personally, I didn?t know why it was so important to plant the trees and save the forest until today. Obviously, destroying the forest in order to develop and build facilities like golf fields and some resorts didn?t seem to cause that much of problem in the past. Overlooking the problem, there has always been increase in this developments that needed sacrifice from the nature. However, this summer is giving us the lesson. Because there are not enough trees to absorb rain, it is whole much more likely to have landslides and inundation. As more flood and landslides are happening, more trees are dying, while we need more and more.

Since my main topic is about foot-and-mouth disease, let me briefly talk about that. Well, after this heavy downpour, animal farms in Gyeong-gi, including Paju, is facing a hard time. 24 farms had to kill their animals, approximately numbering about 270,000. Moreover, some provinces faced release of leachate. Although nothing serious happened in Paju yet, I will still pay attention and report any other damages.