Korea Forest Service Secures 56.3 Billion KRW Supplementary Budget to Strengthen Wildfire Response Capabilities

[Asia Economy (Daejeon) Reporter Jeong Il-woong] The Korea Forest Service announced on the 31st that it secured a budget of 56.3 billion KRW to strengthen wildfire response capabilities through the ‘2022 2nd Supplementary Budget’ recently approved by the National Assembly.

The budget secured in the supplementary budget will mainly be used to enhance on-site response capabilities for increasingly large-scale wildfires throughout the year and to support forest households in wildfire-affected areas.

Specifically, the supplementary budget will be allocated to the additional acquisition of one ultra-large helicopter (5.5 billion KRW), nine high-performance wildfire suppression vehicles (6.7 billion KRW), expansion of 59 wildfire suppression vehicles (1.7 billion KRW), improvement of treatment for special wildfire suppression teams (1.3 billion KRW), expansion of forest roads by 100 km (22.1 billion KRW), and removal of flammable materials such as fumigation piles for pine wilt disease (14.9 billion KRW).

The supplementary budget also includes a provision of 4 billion KRW to support 400 households of pine mushroom (songi) gatherers who lost their income sources due to recent wildfires.

The Korea Forest Service plans to execute the supplementary budget early to strengthen preparedness for autumn wildfires and to proactively respond to spring wildfires next year.

Nam Sung-hyun, Administrator of the Korea Forest Service, stated, “Taking this opportunity of securing the supplementary budget, the Korea Forest Service will expand firefighting equipment such as wildfire suppression helicopters and high-performance wildfire suppression vehicles to suppress large-scale wildfires and focus on fundamentally preventing wildfires.”

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