North Korea Set to Release Environment Report with UN
Date: 01-Apr-04
Country: SOUTH KOREA
Author: Jack Kim
A two-year joint study with the United Nations Environment Program showed that isolated North Korea has not escaped environmental problems that require urgent responses, ranging from air, water and land pollution to battling dust and sand storms blowing from northern China, they said.
"The North Koreans recognize that work needs to be done," the director of the UN environment program's Asia-Pacific region, Surendra Shrestha, told Reuters.
"And they were very cooperative for the survey that was done over two years," he said, as he sipped Singaporean bottled water recycled from sewage and showcased at the U.N. Environment Program conference on South Korea's Cheju island.
A delegation from North Korea's National Coordinating Committee for the Environment visited the U.N. program in Thailand in February, finalising a proposed environment framework agreement for the country.
The comprehensive report on the state of the North Korean environment had been planned for release during the three-day meeting of the global ministerial environment. But the publication was delayed because North Korea chose not to attend for unspecified reasons, officials said.
A critical problem faced by the North is dust and sand storms blowing in from the deserts of northern China each spring, South Korean meteorological agency researcher Chun Young-sin told environment officials here.
"Dust and sand storms are much more serious in the North, perhaps about twice or three times as serious as in the South," she said.
North Korea does not produce anywhere near the pollution of its neighbors because it lacks fossil fuel to operate factories, power plants and automobiles. But what industrial facilities it does run are not equipped with modern treatment equipment.
But the North borders with the South along a 4-km (2.4 mile) wide stretch of demilitarized zone that is almost untouched by people since the end of the Korean War in 1953 and is considered a potentially valuable wildlife haven.
Officials here reported little progress, however, in the proposal by South Africa's Nelson Mandela to establish a peace park there.
