Seoul to create eco-friendly jobs

By Christian Oliver in Seoul
Published: March 5 2009 18:24

One year ago, many environmentalists saw Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, as a bete noire, fearing a former construction executive who once planned to carve a giant canal down the whole length of the country.
But he has changed, spearheading a huge Won 50,000bn ($32bn, €25.5bn, £22.6bn) “Green New Deal” intended to create employment during a brutal economic downturn and revolutionise South Korea’s whole industrial economy.

The projects include forestry, cleaning rivers, cycle paths, railways, environmentally friendly homes and more efficient energy consumption. They are intended to create 950,000 jobs over the next four years.
“We know that the old strategy of semiconductors, mobile phones, cars and ship-building cannot continue. This is the biggest policy paradigm shift,” Kwon Tae-shin, minister of the prime minister’s office, told the Financial Times.
Mr Kwon said the priority was to steel Korea for a surge in unemployment and find work for the sort of family breadwinners who were hit hard by the financial crisis of 1997-98, many of them driven to suicide.
He admitted there could be trouble finding enough hands for all the manual labour, some of whom might have to come from abroad.
However, policymakers have stressed the basic groundwork projects will have a rapid trickle down effect into services such as leisure and jobs for well-qualified graduates, working on technology such as solar panels.
Korea has one of the world’s largest solar power stations and is branching into tidal power, trying to combat an overwhelming dependence on imported oil. Mr Kwon also expected Korea would be able to produce its own voluntary carbon emissions targets before December.
However, not everyone is convinced Korea has gone green. The country has a dismal reputation among bird enthusiasts for destroying wetlands and killing migratory birds by claiming land seven times the size of Manhattan from the Yellow Sea for factories.
Birds Korea, a conservation group, has called for the suspension of the project to clean and dredge four main rivers and exploit them for leisure activities until the full impact on endangered birdlife has been assessed.
Nial Moores, the group’s director, said many of the schemes he had seen appeared to fall short of South Korea’s international commitments on biodiversity and endangered species under international environmental protocols, including some with the UN.
“Some species that are easily disturbed will be lost,” he said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009