All 226 basic local governments across the country each hold a basic carbon neutrality plan. When the Green Transition Institute examined these plans, the only place in South Jeolla to receive an A grade was Haenam County. Geoje's plan from the same period was classified as C grade. It means that results diverge even when the sentences on paper look similar.
A basic local government's carbon neutrality plan is a document required by law. The problem lies in the fact that a document is not implementation. Depending on what percentage the reduction target is written as, who manages that target, and which budget line the funding is attached to, plans of the same length operate in entirely different ways.
Haenam County's plan states its reduction target clearly. The target is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, or 335,000 tons, by 2030. It has not only set a target, as it is also pursuing an RE100 industrial complex, a carbon-neutral AI data center cluster, an Agri-Food Climate Change Response Center, and a carbon neutrality education center. It takes the form of a reduction figure as a target paired with the physical space to hold that target within a single document.
Gimcheon chose to reorganize its structure. In January, the city created a new Climate and Energy Division to oversee climate change response as part of a reorganization. Four teams covering climate change response, energy, green space and landscape management, and park management were placed under one division. Using this division as a control tower, the city plans to draw up the third Gimcheon climate crisis adaptation measures and to check progress on implementation through its own evaluation.
When a division is created, name tags get attached to budget lines. Gimcheon is pursuing a 14.5 billion won air quality improvement project that bundles together operation of a heavy metal monitoring station, enforcement of driving restrictions on grade 5 vehicles, and support for early scrapping of aging diesel vehicles. Urban air monitoring stations at three sites, the old city center, the innovation city and the industrial complex, continuously measure six items: fine dust, ultrafine dust, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and ozone. The heavy metal monitoring station inside the environmental works office at the Daegwang agricultural and industrial complex analyzes lead, cadmium, chromium and copper.
A fuel switch is also under way. This year the city is spending 3.5 billion won to lay additional LPG pipeline networks in four villages and to extend supply lines to 1,222 households that city gas had not reached. Gimcheon Life Science High School is set to get a "climate adaptation green zone" with a rainwater recycling waterway, rooftop and wall greening, and a rest area. Bugok Housing Site No. 1 Park will be fitted with an outdoor performance venue and a lawn plaza.
There are also channels for residents to take part directly. The carbon neutrality point system compares electricity, tap water and city gas use in homes, commercial facilities and apartment complexes against the same period over the past two years and gives incentives in proportion to the savings achieved. A total of 6,800 households have signed up, and about 800 vehicles are taking part in the automotive carbon point system. Kim Cheol-su, head of Gimcheon's Climate and Energy Division, treats this system as one pillar of the division's work.
Comparing the three areas shows common threads. Whether the target carries figures and units, whether a division responsible for that target exists on the organizational chart, and whether the budget is attached to individual projects so it can be traced. The detailed reasons for Geoje's C grade have not been confirmed, but other cases show that the axes that separate the grades lie somewhere around these three. Rather than assigning blame, it is closer to a difference in how many of the parts that make a plan run have been fitted.
Of course, a plan's grade does not guarantee the actual amount of reductions. How far Haenam's 40% target will be met, and what Gimcheon's new division will produce in its first year, remain to be seen. Still, it is clear that without a good plan, a good outcome has to rely on chance. A grade is a marker showing the starting point.
Readers are encouraged to look up the basic carbon neutrality plan on their own area's website and check the reduction target figure and the name of the responsible division. If both are written down clearly, that area's plan is relatively ready to run. As Gimcheon's 6,800 households did, a single point system application form raises that plan's participant count by one.
