Seoul's “Botanical City” Programme — Tracked Expansion of Urban Forest in Living Spheres (2021–2024)

Seoul declared itself a “Botanical City” in an official December 2024 report as part of a multi-year push to expand green infrastructure inside residential “living spheres” — areas within regular walking distance of homes — rather than only in large peripheral mountain parks.

Between 2021 and 2024, the Seoul Metropolitan Government's own published tracking showed total urban-forest area up 6.53% and per-capita living-sphere forest area up 11.59% (from 11.79 m² to 13.15 m² per resident), even as the city's population fell by roughly 53,000 people (-0.56%) over the same period.

Separately, Korea's National Institute of Forest Science — an arm of the Korea Forest Service, reported by The Herald Business in August 2026 — valued the heat-island-mitigation benefit of Seoul's accessible urban forest at ₩1.33 trillion (~US$942 million) in avoided summer electricity costs, roughly double the 2020 valuation. On the institute's own measure, per-capita accessible forest area rose 22.6% (from 11.48 m² to 14.07 m²), and electricity prices rose 63.9% over the comparison period — both cited as drivers of the higher valuation.

The two sources use different per-capita baselines and survey years, so their figures are best read as two independently produced, directionally consistent lines of evidence rather than a single reconciled statistic. Neither source publishes tonnes of CO2 sequestered, species counts, or stormwater metrics for the programme.

Read the full analysis: https://english.seoul.go.kr/seouls-urban-forest-area-per-capita-in-living-spheres-increased-by-11-59-demonstrating-the-citys-growth-as-a-botanical-city/