Climate action on transport by Korea

14% of Korea’s greenhouse gas emissions are caused by transport as of 2017, making it the third largest contributor after industry and the power sector. The majority of emissions by transport come from road transport. The climate crisis is the greatest challenge of the 21st century and it is imperative that countries get their act together and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This article outlines what kind of climate action Korea intends to do in the transport sector and show how this is sadly highly insufficient.

Climate Crisis and the Paris Agreement

Countries adopted in 2015 the Paris Agreement to move towards stronger and more ambitious global action against the climate crisis. The main goals of the Paris Agreement are to limit the increase of the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. The issue is that the world has already exceeded 1.2°C of global warming, adding urgency to the need for more climate action. To reach these goals, total greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

Countries submit their climate action plans through the ‘Nationally Determined Contributions’ and ‘Long-term Low Greenhouse Gas Emission Development Strategies’ (or just ‘Long-term Strategies’) which are submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The current Nationally Determined Contributions are a climate strategy document with a short-term perspective and climate action from now until 2030 or 2035. The long-term strategies feature activities and scenarios until 2050.

It is important to understand that these climate strategies do not capture all transport policies by a country. However, this article will focus on them because I want to highlight what Korea explicitly outlines as their contribution to global climate action and what kind of transport policies they feature in these climate strategies.

Transport in Korea’s Nationally Determined Contribution

The most recent versions of Korea’s climate strategies were submitted in 2020 and 2021 under the Moon Jae-in administration. Korea’s Nationally Determined Contribution of 2021 states that their goal is to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from the 2018 level by 2030.

Further, the document contains the following paragraph on transport:

The Republic of Korea has markedly raised its 2030 target on the deployment of zero-emission vehicles such as the ones powered by electricity and hydrogen. In tandem with this, the Korean government is seeking to reduce trips by car, including through the improvement of public transportation services. In the shipping and aviation sectors, emission reduction efforts will be focused on distributing eco-friendly ships and enhancing the operational efficiency of aircraft.

Korea’s transport content from their Nationally Determined Contribution

The mentioned 2030 target is to have 3 million electric vehicles and 850,000 hydrogen vehicles on the roads by 2030. Korea is one of very few countries that bets high on hydrogen for transport, while there are many studies that explain how hydrogen is unsuitable for most transport modes. Hydrogen is a way for the oil and gas industry to justify their business and secure future investments. Hydrogen will play a role in aviation and shipping but Korea’s Nationally Determined Contribution only connects these modes to ‘eco-friendly’ features and enhancing ‘operational efficiency’.

The Nationally Determined Contribution points to the K-ETS, Korea’s emission trading scheme, and how it was expanded in 2020 to include transport. This will lead to more pressure on automobile manufacturers to produce zero-emission vehicles.

A strong point is that the climate strategy recognizes that car trips need to be reduced and replaced by public transport. However, there is no detail on how it will be achieved. This is a general issue of climate strategies, not only in Korea’s case. The majority of them are superficial and lack detail on implementation.

Long-term climate action

Looking at the long-term strategy, which is usually a longer, more comprehensive document (130 pages vs. 30 pages of the Nationally Determined Contribution), I hoped for more information on climate action by Korea. Korea’s long-term strategy is aligned to the Nationally Determined Contributions and thus, it expands on the key activities mentioned above. Activities on transport in the long-term strategy are summarized as:

• Mix biofuels for road transportation
• Promote eco-friendly vehicles and improve average fuel efficiency
• Advance railway system
• Advance aviation system
• Advance shipping system
• Promote traffic demand management

The long-term strategy mentions freight transport, an area which requires a lot of attention. Climate action on freight transport focus on shifting goods transport from roads to rail or maritime transport. This is very challenging in Korea due to the current logistics and freight system.

These long-term transport measures will support Korea’s target to become carbon-neutral by 2050. The Korean New Deal with investments of KRW 160 trillions by 2050. But is this enough?

‘HIGHLY INSUFFICIENT’

The climate action by Korea on transports sounds like a decent level of ambition. However, as a high-income country, Korea needs to do a lot more. The Climate Action Tracker assessed the ambitions by Korea on climate change and their conclusion was that the current climate strategies are highly insufficient. It means, if every country would have similar ambitions as Korea, we would end up with global warming of 4°C.

Transport is not the major issue in Korea because many cities are compact and public transport dominates. There are also many carbon-intensive industries in Korea. However, only focusing on electric vehicles and technologies (biofuels and hydrogen) that have little impact on greenhouse gas mitigation is not sufficient. Electric vehicles are important but the electricity grid needs to be clean. More renewable energy has to be added and support to power electric mobility. Cycling, walking and public transport need to be promoted in more cities and freight needs to find less emission-intensive ways to transport their goods.

If you are interested to read more about transport in climate strategies, please check out this report “Climate Strategies for Transport” or browse through this online tracker of transport in climate strategies.