Air pollution legislation in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea: an overview

This paper aims to study the current legislation in the hermit State of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), which seems to be less known in the scientific community than those of the Republic of Korea (ROK). In the situational introduction, estimates of the WHO are presented on populations, tuberculosis incidence, probability of dying from cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases, road traffic and air pollution mortality, and the annual means of PM 2.5 concentrations. Unfortunately, the DPRK does not publish statistics on pollutant concentrations and involved adverse effects, and the literature on these topics is rare. The DPRK publishes air quality indices, where it is not clear if DPRK concentrates on United States air quality indices or other ones. Moreover, for carbon oxide the estimation is faulty. After discussion on the methodology, the environmental protection law, the environmental impact law, and the air pollution prevention law of the DPKR will be discussed and analyzed in detail. A section is devoted to a comparison of the scopes of environmental legislation in the DPRK and the ROK. The conclusion argues that the existing DPRK legislation on air pollution management is incomplete and flawed.