North Korea's Footprint 1961-2002

North Korea's official ideology is one of "juche", or "self-reliance." However for many years the country relied on natural resources from beyond its own borders. Soviet fuel and Chinese grain powered and fed the country. With the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, the country's primary energy supply dried up. In the aftershocks, China slashed its grain exports to North Korea.

Isolated, the country came face to face with its own ecological limitations (see Figure 1 and 2). Agriculture shrank from lack of imported fertilizers, reducing the country's biocapacity. According to some estimates, the resulting famine (exacerbated by two natural disasters, from which the country lacked resources to recover) affects over half of the population and lower estimates of the death toll are in the hundreds of thousands.

North Korea prepared for "self-reliance," but through poor management failed to realize it. When economic and political shocks forced the country to abruptly close its longstanding ecological deficit, a tragic famine resulted. Similarly, our planet as a whole is "self-reliant", with no recourse to external trade or aide. North Korea is a sobering example of what can happen when a society meets nature's constraints unprepared.

This graph shows how North Korea has moved from using, in net terms, about its full domestic biocapacity in 1961 to 2.7 times the biocapacity of North Korea in the 1980s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the North Korean Footprint sharply reduced to about 2.2 times the biocapacity of North Korea in 2002. The ecological deficit that exists when ecological demand exceeds supply can be financed by importing biocapacity, liquidating existing stocks of ecological capital, or allowing wastes to accumulate and ecosystems to degrade.

 
 
Figure 1 illustrates, for each year, how many North Koreas were required to meet the resource requirements of North Korea. Resource demand (Ecological Footprint) for the country as a whole is the product of population times per capita consumption. Resource supply (biocapacity) varies each year with ecosystem management, agricultural practices (such as fertilizer use and irrigation), ecosystem degradation, and weather. This figure shows the ratio between the country's demand and the country's biocapacity in each year, and how this ratio has changed over time. Expressed in terms of "number of North Koreas," the biocapacity of North Korea is always 1 (represented by the horizontal blue line).
 

 
Figure 2 Starting in the 1960s, North Korea carried an increasing ecological deficit. When its main sources of imports closed around 1990, the country’s Footprint declined sharply. North Korea is still running an ecological deficit, but significantly smaller than in the 1980s. The current deficit is largely comprised of services from the global commons (providing a sink for greenhouse gasses) and food aid from the international community. The remainder results from liquidation of its own assets.
 

Figure 3 shows the components of average per person Ecological Footprint in North Korea.
 
 

Footprint trends in eight countries and the world show how Ecological Footprints have developed at the national level over the last 40 years. All figures are based on data from the 2005 Edition of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts.   •  World •  China •  France •  India •  Korea, DPR (North) •  Korea, Rep. (South) •  Mexico •  Netherlands •  Philippines