Private Forest Owners '2.17 Million', Owning 1.9 Hectares Per Person

Provided by Korea Forest Service

[Asia Economy (Daejeon) Reporter Jeong Il-woong] Among the nation's 6.36 million hectares of forestland, 418 hectares are privately owned, with the number of private forest owners reaching 2.17 million. The average forestland area owned by these individuals is estimated to be 1.9 hectares.

The Korea Forest Service announced these details in the "2019 National Forest Owner Status" report. According to the data, the number of private forest owners has increased by an average of 10,000 annually over the past three years. The number of private forest owners by year was approximately 2.153 million in 2017, 2.163 million in 2018, and 2.173 million in 2019.

Typically, private forest owners are classified as individuals, corporations, clans, and foreigners. Among these, individual owners number about 2 million, accounting for 92% of all private forest owners. Additionally, 85.7% of private forest owners possess less than 3 hectares of forestland per person.

By age group, those in their 60s numbered 470,000 (23.7%), followed by those in their 50s with 440,000 (22.3%).

Among individual private forest owners, the proportion of "local owners"?those residing within the same city or province as their owned forest?is identified as an average of 44.0% nationwide. By city and province, Busan had the highest local owner ratio at 64.2%, followed by Seoul at 58.8%, Gyeonggi at 57.1%, and Daejeon at 56.9%.

Im Sang-seop, Planning and Coordination Officer at the Korea Forest Service, stated, "The increase in private forest owners may be influenced by the recent growing interest in returning to rural mountain villages. We will promote forest policies to enable private forest owners, who hold 66% of the forestland, to actively engage in forestry activities."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.