Ecosystem Conservation Cooperation Charge — Compensatory Restoration Fund (South Korea)

Under South Korea's Natural Environment Conservation Act, developers whose projects damage a threshold area of natural ecosystems must pay an Ecosystem Conservation Cooperation Charge into a restoration fund administered by the Ministry of Environment. The charge, introduced in 2001, is calculated by multiplying the destroyed area by a per-square-metre rate (250 KRW/m2 at introduction, since raised to 300 KRW/m2) and a regional ecological coefficient, capped at 5 billion KRW per project.

Revenue funds "Ecosystem Conservation Charge Return Projects" (ECCRP) that restore damaged habitats, typically prioritising sites near existing source populations of target species. Guidelines revised in 2010 pushed project designers to specify target species explicitly; by the study period, 78.3% of projects did so, spanning 157 distinct species including 36 endangered ones, with birds, amphibians and insects as the main focus.

Between 2003 and 2022, 277 ECCRP restoration projects were completed nationwide, rising from around 3 per year at the outset to roughly 30 per year by 2022. Gyeonggi province led with 67 projects (24.2% of the total) and the Han River Basin Environmental Office alone administered 105 (37.9%); 83 projects (30%) took place in wetlands, 69 (24.9%) in urban areas and 47 (17%) in forestry land.

Independent academic review is more cautious than the programme's scale suggests. A 2024 peer-reviewed study (Sustainability, MDPI) found "a substantial lack of academic research assessing outcomes" and called for decade-long post-restoration monitoring. A separate valuation study found the statutory charge rate significantly undervalues real ecosystem-service worth (estimated at roughly 1,300-3,500 KRW/m2 per year), suggesting the fee charged to developers may be too low to fully offset the biodiversity damage it is meant to compensate.

Read the full analysis: https://www.koreascience.or.kr/article/JAKO201410051648624.page