Korea’s newly installed Forest Service chief has pledged to rewrite regulations and expand support for the country’s 2.2 million forest owners and 200,000 foresters, with the private forestry workforce cast as the first line for reviving mountain village economies and rebuilding roughly 104,000 hectares of burnt forest across North and South Gyeongsang and Ulsan.
Yesterday, Commissioner Park Eun-sik chaired a policy customer meeting with foresters at the Government Complex Daejeon, saying “the role of foresters is more important than ever for revitalising mountain village economies and rebuilding areas damaged by wildfires.”
Park also pledged to “actively reform regulations and expand support for forestry management from the perspective of 2.2 million forest owners and 200,000 foresters,” a constituency now carrying the salvage and replanting workload from the March 2025 wildfires that killed 32 people, destroyed 5,000 buildings and were declared to be the largest forest fires in Korea’s history.
Park took office on 3 March 2026 as the 37th Administrator of the Korea Forest Service, succeeding Lim Sang-seop, who oversaw the 2025 fire response. Tuesday’s roundtable was Park’s first detailed engagement with the private forestry constituency since his 18 April tour of Daedunsan Provincial Park, where he inspected drone-based enforcement of the illegal-burning ban and pressed village heads on spring-season wildfire prevention.
Korea carries one of the world’s highest forest cover ratios at roughly 65 per cent of total land area, more than double the global average, with most of its 6.3 million hectares of forest estate in private ownership built up through the national greening program that ran from 1973 through 1986.
The 2.2 million owners Park addressed on Tuesday hold the bulk of that estate, and their appetite to invest in thinning, replanting and firebreak maintenance will determine whether the KFS can keep pace with wildfire conditions that World Weather Attribution researchers now rate as around twice as likely in today’s warmer atmosphere.
That scale of private ownership has made Korea the reference case for countries looking to rebuild war-damaged and fire-damaged forests, a comparison Wood Central drew when Ukraine began canvassing the Korean model for its own post-invasion forest recovery. Park’s reform agenda will now be tested to see whether that half-century model can hold up as drier springs, depopulation, and an ageing forester cohort press on the economics of Korean forestry.
Park closed the roundtable by committing the Korea Forest Service to treat that workforce as the front line for post-fire recovery across the roughly 104,000 hectares burned in the March 2025 wildfires, with regulatory reform to follow through the remainder of 2026.
