By the 1950s war had stripped South Korea's hills bare, and few believed the forests would return: yet a decades-long national planting campaign brought them back, and today woodland covers roughly two-thirds of the whole country once again

One number stops me every time I read about South Korea’s forests. Historical estimates put forest cover at roughly 35 percent in 1955, just after the Korean War, while World Bank data put it at about 64 percent in 2023. A country whose hills were mostly bare turned back into a country that is mostly trees, inside one human lifetime.

What strikes me is how ordinary the starting point was. This was not remote wilderness that healed on its own. It was land worked hard by people who had no better option, and it came back because of choices, money, and enforcement rather than luck.

How bare “bare” actually was

By the end of the Korean War, forest area had shrunk to 36 to 40 percent of what it had been before. This was not just due to the Korean War but also Japanese occupation. 

The scale is easy to underrate. An Asian Development Bank brief says that until the late 1950s, 58 percent of the mountains were bald, and about 11 percent of the land had gone effectively barren, closer to desert than forest.

Stand on one of those slopes in 1959 and be told two-thirds of the country would be woodland again within a lifetime, and the honest response would have been disbelief.

A campaign, not an accident

The turnaround was planned. Starting in the early 1960s and ramping up under President Park Chung-hee, the state ran a national greening program built around a series of ten-year plans. It was blunt and thorough: mass planting, hard limits on logging, and a deliberate push to get households off firewood.

The planting figures are the part people quote, and they earn it. About 2.4 million hectares of forest were restored between 1973 and 1987. A KDI School case study counts 4.8 billion trees planted during the first two ten-year plans. Park put the goal in slogan terms, and CIFOR reports his aim as “turning bare land into a green nation”.

The part I find most interesting is not the trees. Planting billions of seedlings does nothing if people dig them up for fuel the next winter. So the campaign paired the planting with a switch from firewood to coal briquettes, that came to heat most Korean homes. That took the pressure off the hills.

Jae Soo Bae, a lead researcher on the case at CIFOR, put it sharply: “The core success factors that supported forest recovery of South Korea were external to the forestry sector.” That is his read of one national case, not a settled law, but it lands. The forests recovered partly because the economy gave people something to burn that was not a tree.

Bae also points to something harder to measure. In his account, “Korea has a long history of a strong communitarian culture, where mountainous forests were viewed as common-pool resources as well as sacred places.” I would treat that as one thread, not the whole story. Plenty of places with communal traditions have watched their forests vanish anyway. But combined with strict enforcement and a village-level effort to get people involved, it seems to have helped.

Where the numbers sit now

The recovery has held. On World Bank figures sourced from the FAO, South Korea’s forest cover was 64.1 percent of total land in 2023, against a world average of about 31 percent. It has slipped a little from a 1990 peak near 68 percent, but it sits close to where it was before the devastation, which is roughly the whole point.

The forests are also fuller than a coverage figure suggests. The amount of wood standing per hectare reached about 165 cubic meters per hectare by 2020, roughly 29 times the 1953 figure and above the average for wealthy nations. Young planted forests take decades to fill out, and these have had the time.

The case now travels as an argument that ruined land is not always a one-way door. Inger Andersen, who heads the UN Environment Programme, told the Korea Times that “It’s hard to find comparisons with other places where you see the same determination and success.” Her conclusion was plainer still: “The message is that you can bring nature back.”

I would hold that message with one caveat. What worked here was a specific mix of conditions: a determined government and an economy that could afford another fuel. Not every ruined landscape has that mix, and recovery is not guaranteed anywhere. But South Korea does settle one question that seemed closed in 1959. Bare mountains can become forests again, and if you doubt it, the trees are there to count.