- Korea's forests used to cover up to two-thirds of the entire nation, however, due to indiscriminate lumbering during the Japanese colonization and bombings of the Korean war, as well as uncontrolled usages for fuel and logs in the early 1960's, most of the forests became devastated.
after the 1960s, the government initiated stringent afforestation programs, such as erosion control,
- reforestation, prevention of wild fire, and insect pest control, successfully turning naked mountains into green forests and increasing forest stocks to cover 63.46m3/ha('00) from only 10.40m3/ha('70).
- Recently, however, parts of the forests were appropriated to public facility sites and industrial complexes and as a consequence, the ratio of forest to total land area decreased by 2.5 percent, from 67.1 percent ('70) to 64.6 percent ('00).
- Until recently, conifers used to cover more than 40 percent of Korea's entire forest lands, but that trend is changing to show higher coverage of broad-leaf trees and mixed trees.
- By the end of 2000, of the entire 6.422 million ha of forest lands in Korea, national forests covered 1.433 million ha, or 22.3 percent, forests owned by local governments 492 thousand ha, or 7.7 percent, and private forests 70 percent.
- Production, Import & Export of Forestry Products
- The government began updating statistics on forestry products in 1910 and the surveyed list soon expanded to meet the diversified usages of forest resources. In the future, it is expected to expand further as the development of new technologies becomes available, making the utilization of various forestry products possible.
The export of forestry products peaked in 1990 and since then declined.
- The main reason for such decline is the weakened price competitiveness of Korean wood products, as Korea's lumber industries moved their business units abroad to Indonesia and Malaysia, major lumber producing countries, for lumber processing and export. as for stone products, most are imported from China en mass.
- The import of major forestry products, such as wood, wood materials, and stone products, reached the peak between 1995~1996, when the domestic economy picked up, and then plummeted after the 1998 foreign currency crisis. It is, however, recovering encouraged by the sign of improvements in the domestic economy.
- Forest Fires
- In the 1990s, the success of the government's reforestation policy which transformed naked hills into thick forests, lost its gloss to a degree due to the increasing number of forest fires and damages brought about by the surge of mountain visitors and hikers.
- In 2000, due to frequent abnormally dry weathers, there were increased cases of disastrous forest fires. Now, efforts are being made to secure modern, state-of-the-art fire extinguishing equipments such as helicopters, and to establish advanced fire control system such as GPS systems.
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