Busan City Warms Citizens' Daily Lives... Implementing the '2024 Winter Season Comprehensive Measures for Livelihood Stability'

Welfare, Safety, Health, and Living: 34 Major Tasks and 60 Detailed Tasks in 4 Areas

Mayor Park Hyung-jun: "Strengthening Safety Nets for Cold Wave Vulnerable Groups Is Our Top Priority; We Will Do Our Best to Ensure Citizens Have a Warm and Safe Daily Life"

Busan City is implementing the ‘2024 Winter Season Comprehensive Measures for Public Stability’ to ensure that citizens can spend a warm and safe winter.

This plan focuses on establishing comprehensive support measures that citizens can genuinely feel, promoting 34 major tasks and 60 detailed tasks across four areas: welfare, safety, health, and daily life.

◆ Sharing Welfare

Using big data, the city actively identifies welfare blind spots and builds a winter community safety net through meticulous support for vulnerable groups’ livelihood stability.

To discover welfare blind spots that worsen during winter, the city is expanding crisis information based on the Happiness(e)um platform (from 44 types to 47 types) and actively utilizing human resources such as initial consultations linked with information and communication/artificial intelligence technology and 197 visiting health and welfare dedicated teams.

Emergency welfare support is provided to stabilize the living conditions of households in crisis. Key details include payments for single-person households eligible for emergency welfare: ▲living expenses (713,000 KRW) ▲housing costs (398,000 KRW) ▲fuel costs (150,000 KRW) ▲medical expenses (up to 3 million KRW).

For low-income and near-poverty groups, support includes ▲energy vouchers (average 314,000 KRW per household) and ▲winter countermeasure funds (100,000 KRW for 6,000 households). Additionally, a constant protection system operates to provide emergency shelter and distribute heating supplies for cold-vulnerable groups such as homeless people and residents of small rooms.

Furthermore, the city supports private fundraising campaigns such as the ‘Hope 2025 Sharing Campaign’ and promotes a warm sharing atmosphere through free meals for the elderly, disabled, and homeless, as well as kimchi-making expense support.

◆ Citizen Safety

The city establishes a winter natural disaster response system for heavy snow, cold waves, and wildfires, and focuses on securing citizen safety through pre-inspections to prevent fires and safety accidents.

To build a system for heavy snow and cold wave preparedness, a total of 592 million KRW from the city disaster management fund has been pre-allocated to districts and counties, and supplies such as ▲deicing agents (1,077 tons), ▲snow removal equipment (346 units), and ▲snow storage boxes (4,342 locations) have been secured in advance.

During actual hazardous weather, the city conducts ▲proactive situation assessment meetings and ▲activates disaster safety countermeasure headquarters according to crisis levels to promptly carry out snow removal and respond to situations.

For wildfire prevention, the city deploys ▲621 wildfire watchers, secures ▲36,538 wildfire equipment items in advance to establish a firefighting system, and operates a wildfire prevention countermeasure headquarters.

Additionally, thorough safety inspections are conducted at multi-use facilities, fire-vulnerable sites, and construction sites to eliminate factors threatening citizen safety and prevent safety accidents.

◆ Citizen Health

The city focuses on preventing cold-related illnesses and infections among vulnerable groups, conducts food hygiene inspections for winter, and implements measures to reduce high concentrations of fine dust to create a healthy environment.

To prevent cold-related illnesses among health-vulnerable groups, the city operates ▲16 visiting health management teams (133 members) and ▲1,223 health guardians, and provides cold wave response supplies such as ▲comforters and scarves (to 140 households) and ▲insulation curtain installation (to 13 households) targeting near-poverty groups.

Moreover, the city works to increase the vaccination rate for seniors aged 65 and older and maintains a constant response system for 748 infection-vulnerable facilities to intensively manage infectious diseases.

In preparation for the kimchi-making season and year-end holidays, the city strengthens ▲food hygiene inspections and food poisoning prevention management, and until March 2025, it strives to implement the ▲6th seasonal fine dust management plan to reduce high concentrations of fine dust.

◆ Citizen Daily Life

The city alleviates the burden of prices for winter kimchi-making by stabilizing the supply and prices of agricultural and marine products and addresses inconveniences in daily life such as winter cleaning and water and sewage management measures.

The city operates ▲kimchi vegetable supply stabilization task forces (3 teams, 15 members) and ▲marine product price stabilization task forces (16 districts/counties, 4 teams) to monitor the supply situation and prices of agricultural and marine products.

In addition, the city establishes ▲winter waste disposal measures and ▲water and sewage management plans to minimize citizen inconveniences that may arise during winter and respond promptly to civil complaints.

Mayor Park Hyung-jun stated, “Due to recent intensified abnormal climate, the possibility of sudden cold waves and heavy snow has increased, and the burden of living expenses such as heating costs has risen, which may worsen difficulties especially for vulnerable groups. Through this comprehensive winter public stability plan, we will prioritize strengthening the safety net for cold-vulnerable groups and protecting citizens’ safety from disasters, doing our best to ensure that all citizens can spend a warm and safe daily life.”

Busan City Hall.

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