Multilevel forest science, regime and governance: Case studies of Korea

This study is a set of three different case studies surrounding Korea, which demonstrate how social services of forest ecosystems are rendered or utilized at municipal, national and regional levels both quantitatively and qualitatively. From the first part of the study on the health benefits of Seoul urban forest, the final result is the modeling of urban forest effects on human exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation on a city-wide scale. It showed that the urban trees in a specific condition could be a not only supplementary but also major protection from UV exposure by quantifying the urban trees' effects on mitigating the intensity of UV radiation. The maximum value of protection factor (PF) was 11.81 in park & cemetery land use. The following chapter about the East Asian Biosphere Reserve Network (EABRN) showed how forest resources, combined with Korean nationalism for reunification, could be a determinant factor for initiating and implementing an international environmental regime, along with some other factors such as epistemic community. It also illustrated how effective the international regime was in enabling periodical scientific collaboration among the member countries including North and South Korea. The next chapter on Asian regional institutions of forest governance was also illustrative of how forest ecosystems provided incentives for Asian countries to launch their own governance mechanisms separately from the existing ones introduced by the outsiders such as World Bank or the EU. One of the trends identified in the chapter, Asianization, could be linked to the concept of self-governance such as what Ostrom (1999) described in that forest users in many locations have organized themselves to protect and enhance local forests. It also showed that Asian countries' acceptance of their institutions' legally binding nature as exemplified by EU FLEGT East Asia and AFoCO, which is in agreement with the emerging principles of international forest law.