WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Carbon technocracy has constituted the material and technical condition of South Korea’s developmental modernity. The nation’s export-oriented growth depended on a regime that externalized the environmental harms of energy production to the provincial periphery, rendering these sacrifice zones structurally dependent on energy infrastructure and entrenching uneven development. Samcheok, a coastal city in Gangwon Province, exemplifies this trajectory. From Japanese colonial industrial plans in the 1920s to postwar coal-fired power plants under the developmental state, its economy was organized around coal. This paper explores how climatization - the process through which environmental conflicts are reframed through the lens of global climate change - transformed the place-based struggle.

The Korean Peninsula is not only a human habitat but also a planetary passage for migratory birds. Yet it is less well recognized that reclaimed lands on the west coast have become crucial wintering sites for migratory birds in South Korea since the late twentieth century. This study aims to trace South Korea’s land reclamation projects and profound reconfigurations in multispecies relations that followed, in order to identify the rupture between multispecies relations in the Holocene and those of the Anthropocene. Particularly, this study develops and complicates the discussion by foregrounding the Baikal Teal (Sibirionetta formosa) as a nonhuman protagonist that suddenly appeared in large flocks after the large-scale Cheonsu Bay reclamation. This study argues that the Cheonsu Bay reclamation has generated new forms of human–bird entanglements in South Korea.

This presentation investigates American and South Korean efforts to shift domestic fuel use from firewood to fossil fuels in the 1950s, focusing on how transportation routes around the Taebaek Coalfield—the mining heartland of South Korea—facilitated this transition. After the Korean War, excessive household firewood use, which accounted for 97 percent of fuel consumption, threatened to devastate forests and undermine agriculture. This paper shows that, as fuel transition became an urgent response to this environmental crisis, delivering coal to households and constructing energy transportation routes emerged as central objectives of state policy. This presentation argues that the Korean War and postwar authoritarianism together shaped South Korea’s distinctive energy transition by enabling the rapid construction of massive energy infrastructure and advancing the onset of its Anthropocene.

This paper examines how marine debris gradually became recognized as an environmental problem in South Korea, and how a global environmental governance agenda was translated into national policy priorities, civic activism, and practices of citizen science. Rather than treating marine debris as a purely local environmental issue, the study traces the historical processes through which it emerged as a multi-scalar concern shaped by global environmental movements, regional governance, and shifting geopolitical conditions. Focusing on the early 1990s, when marine debris gained visibility within global environmental campaigns, the paper explores how the issue was incorporated into post–Cold War environmental governance among Korea, China, and Japan. Particular attention is given to the role of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Regional Seas Programme, through which marine debris was articulated as a shared regional agenda.