Sixty Years of Stagnation in Japan-South Korea Relations: Obstacles and Opportunities for Responding to the Global Environmental Emergency

Introduction

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.”
Ripple et al., State of the Climate Report (2024).
 
“Nature is being lost—with huge implications for us all. ... Dangerous tipping points are approaching. ... We are falling short of our global goals. ... The scale of the challenge demands transformation.”
WWF, Living Planet Report (2024).

Individually, East Asian states are making some progress in addressing the global environmental emergency. China is developing significant renewable energy capacity (Teng et al, 2023) and made firm commitments to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. In 2012 Japan implemented a carbon tax (Gokhale, 2024), and in 2023 launched a carbon pricing and voluntary carbon trading scheme to help fund further decarbonisation towards their 2050 net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions goal (Obayashi and Golubkova, 2023), while in South Korea, decades of work reducing domestic air pollution has seen improvements to air quality, especially over Seoul (Hanghun et al, 2022), with levels of atmospheric particulates falling 30-40% (PM10) and 19% (PM2.5) between 2005 and 2019 (UNEP 2024).
 
Notably, the region lacks organised groups of think tanks (Busch and Judick, 2021) and a politically polarised denialist movement backed by media organisations, such as those found elsewhere. Public opinion consistently highlights environmental concerns as a priority (Mainichi, 2023) and governments appear committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and waste, and tackling biodiversity loss. Even so, East Asian contributions towards achieving global environmental targets are insufficient, and arguably more so than equivalent regions (Table 1).

Table 1. Climate Action Tracker Country Ratings for government action towards the Paris Agreement aim of "holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C." (Climate Action Tracker (2024)).

Crucially, given the gravity and urgency of the emergency, and despite growing environmental awareness in both Japan and Korea and the relative lack of opposition to policies aimed at sustainability and ecological protection, transboundary regional cooperation between the two countries is also insufficient, and lacks direction and coordination. The absence of joint environmental initiatives between the two Koreas is understandable (Morgan, 2024). However, the failure to achieve a coordinated and coherent environmental strategy between Japan and South Korea, East Asia’s two most economically powerful liberal democracies, is disappointing, and offers authoritarian China an opportunity to assert its leadership in global negotiations over the principal crises facing humanity.
 
While it is difficult to argue the lack of something—naturally enough, most of the extant research assesses actual cases of environmental cooperation rather than its absence—examples from other world regions throw light on the East Asian failure. Countries with similarly complex historical relationships to Japan and Korea are transcending past conflicts and leveraging their modern democratic and open societies and establishing effective transboundary cooperative frameworks. 

Comprehensive multilateral cooperative frameworks among previously antagonistic members and non-members of the EU, for example, have become normalised and are now unremarkable. Among EU member states there is the globally influential EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities in finance and business (EU Commission, 2024), which brings together multiple EU and national regulatory bodies and frameworks to enable business and finance to incorporate non-financial risks and opportunities into their investment and business models in pursuit of sustainability. While the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR) (Danube Region Strategy, 2024) involves 14 member and non-member states, some with recent histories of genocide, such as Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
 
There are notable cooperative frameworks developing beyond Europe, too. Signed in Costa Rica in 2018 by 25 Latin American and Caribbean countries, and entering into force in 2021, the Escazú Agreement on environmental justice is the world’s first multilateral environmental treaty to include provisions on protecting the human rights of environmental defenders. Among signatories are states that have endured protracted conflict in recent decades, such as Nicaragua and Guatemala (ECLAC, 2021). Bilaterally, in Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste and Indonesia are overcoming conflict by cooperating on ecological conservation through the Indonesian Seas Large Marine Ecosystem (FAO, 2023). In Africa, Nigeria and Cameroon, after nearly a half-century of conflict over the Bakassi peninsula, this year signed a bilateral Framework Cooperation Agreement on the Conservation of Transboundary Ecosystems and Sustainable Management of Forest and Wildlife Resources, which “marks a major step forward in the implementation of the N’Djamena Declaration on the nexus between transhumance, protected areas and natural resources, development, peace and security” in the Congo Basin (Anyanwu, 2024; CBFP, 2024 ).
 
The importance of achieving international environmental cooperation bilaterally and multilaterally, regionally and globally, cannot be overstated. Japan and Korea share similar geographical and socio-cultural characteristics, have experienced similar developmental and demographic pathways, and both are now liberal democratic polities and advanced economies. Together, they experience common region-specific human-environmental challenges and crises, including fossil fuel over-dependency, collapsing terrestrial and marine ecosystems, the persistence of industrial and urban pollution, and political challenges presented by mutual proximity to Russia, China, Taiwan, and North Korea. Under these circumstances, to the external observer bilateral cooperation would presumably be easy to achieve and, simultaneously, contribute to achieving global targets. Hence, we assert here the critical importance of addressing the protracted acrimony between Japan and South Korea, which is hindering comprehensive bilateral environmental cooperation.
 
These disputes stem from the legacy of Japan’s colonial rule (1910-1945) and remain a significant obstacle for closer cooperation and a joint response to multiple and overlapping areas of concern (Kimura, 2011). Referred to as the ‘History wars’ (Lewis, 2017), they overshadow the potential for close bilateral cooperation on the two standout issues of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. While historical issues remain important, allowing them to impede collaboration on the most pressing issues of our time constitutes a failure of leadership in not ensuring that we leave a sustainable world for succeeding generations, the central concern of the Brundtland Report (1987). Indeed, this has critical consequences not just for future wellbeing and prosperity but has implications for the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions in the East Asian region in the context of a rising authoritarian China.
 
By comparison, individual EU member states gain indirect formal access to the highest levels of global environmental diplomacy because of their collective engagement. Examples include separate EU membership of the G7 and G20, in addition to individual membership for France, Germany and Italy, and a top seat alongside the United States and China as equals at United Nations Conferences of the Parties (COP) on climate change and biodiversity. Japan and South Korea, despite their relative economic power as individual states, are rendered second-tier countries, where once Japan was a top tier participant (Gilson, 2021; Sakaguchi et al, 2020). As the environmental emergency deepens, and amid the relative failure of East Asian liberal democratic leadership to tackle it, a regional diplomatic vacuum has emerged which has global consequences, as authoritarian China asserts itself (Agostines and Urdinez, 2024; Li and Shapiro, 2020).
 
We research regional environmental cooperation, or rather the relative lack of it, between Japan and South Korea across the full spectrum of their bilateral relations. We identify four arenas of potential interaction: supranational, government to government, commerce and industry, and the third sector. To do this we combed through all intergovernmental agreements pertaining specifically to environmental issues contained within digital archives and Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) whitepapers, and exhaustively searched for published materials and press releases from non-state actors such as corporations and NGOs where we could discern an interest in environmental cooperation between the two countries. In so doing we identify obstacles to environmental collaboration and explore how an enhanced Japan-Korea environmental partnership can serve as a catalyst for (re)establishing democratic leadership on facing the multiple crises facing the region. Furthermore, by examining the often disconnected and disjointed nature of Japan-Korea environmental cooperation in these four areas, we identify some nascent successes and demonstrate the potential for deeper ties and a stronger liberal democratic challenge to Chinese leadership of East Asian environmental diplomacy. Before presenting our analysis, however, we first present a necessarily brief overview of the Anthropocene emergency and the background context to Japan-South Korea environmental relations.

The Anthropocene Emergency and China’s Rise to Global Environmental Leadership

The global environmental emergency is the foremost challenge confronting humanity. Composed of multiple interwoven, overlapping, and accelerating crises, the outcome is a profoundly Altered Earth (Thomas, Ed., 2022). This marks a fundamental departure from the comparatively stable and predictable Holocene epoch of the past 10-12,000 years, such that many scientists and humanists agree we are living in a new, unstable, unpredictable, and more dangerous Anthropocene age (Steffen et al, 2011). The Anthropocene transition remains a point of scientific contention (Witze, 2024) but is nevertheless evidenced by substantial anthropogenic changes in Earth systems globally and locally, underscoring the extent to which humans have become the dominant force shaping the planet’s future (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).

Figure 1. Daily Sea Surface Temperature, World: 1981-2024 (17 Oct 2024). Data & Image Source: NOAA & University of Maine, Climate Reanalyzer (University of Maine, 2024).

The urgency of our collective task is most clearly demonstrated by rapidly rising greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere leading to global heating, an especially significant outcome of which is the warming of the oceans, as indicated by an acceleration in sea surface temperatures in 2023-24 (Figure 1, above) (Storto and Yang, 2024). Between 13 March 2023 and 3 July 2024 (Figure 1), global average sea surface temperatures had set a new daily record continuously for 478 days. In 2025, Climate Reanalyzer’s data for the first two months of the year continues to outpace 2023 suggesting that 2024’s warmer January and February was not an anomaly. Sea surface temperatures are significant because they act as a critical guide for present and future climate anomalies, because the world’s oceans act as a store for solar radiation already “in the Pipeline,” with the delayed human response and consequent amplifying feedback requiring “Extraordinary actions… to reduce the net human-made climate forcing… to reduce global warming and avoid highly undesirable consequences for humanity and nature.” (Hansen et al., 2023, 19-20).
 
Significantly, Article 2.1 of the 2015 Paris Agreement binds the 195 signatory countries to:
 
Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change (UNFCCC, 2015).
 
Nevertheless, EU Copernicus ERA5 data for full year of 2024 shows that it was the warmest since the beginning of records in 1850 and the first full calendar year that has exceeded the 1.5-degree limit established in Paris. Each month of 2024 was warmer than any other corresponding month on record going back to 1850 (Copernicus, 2025). For example, the September 2024 global (terrestrial and marine) atmospheric surface temperature increase of 1.54°C above the agreed pre-industrial average (1850-1900), was second only to September 2023 with 1.73°C above the pre-industrial average, and marked the 14th consecutive month globally (Copernicus, 2024). Although the scientific rule of thumb demands a ten-year average for calculating temperature change, these figures demonstrate that we have already experienced a 1.5°C+ rise on an annualised basis.
 
Scientists agree that while these anomalies have been exacerbated by the 2023 El Niño phenomenon, they are mainly attributable to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and there are indications of a recent acceleration of oceanic warming, due to the reduced masking effect of decreasing concentrations of shipping aerosols over the northern hemisphere (Hansen et al, 2023). Indeed, 77% of 380 lead authors of articles feeding into the IPCC Assessment Reports consider that, under current pathways, global temperatures will rise beyond 2.5°C above the pre-industrial average before the end of this century (Guardian, 2024), producing highly undesirable outcomes for people who are alive today.
 
As if that were not sufficient to spur drastic global cooperative action, the 2024 Living Planet Report—the most authoritative survey of the global state of nature available—states that worldwide monitored wildlife populations have declined by 73% since 1970, including an astonishing 95% drop in Caribbean and Latin American wildlife over the same period (WWF, 2024). The extent and rapidity of the depletion of nature globally and regionally is nothing short of catastrophic (Jung, 2016). This is not to overstate the problem; rather it is difficult fully to express its scale in 2024 when terms such as ‘Annihilation’, ‘Catastrophe’, and ‘Cataclysm’ are increasingly being used in the scientific literature, accompanied by longstanding warnings that we are entering a sixth mass extinction event (Ceballos et al, 2017; Leakey and Lewin, 1995; Matanle, 2021).

The emergence of China as a global environmental leader

Historically, it was Japan that played an Asian leadership role in contributing to the global environmental agenda, beginning with tackling the consequences of industrial pollution in the early 1970s and continuing with the development of technologies for improving industrial energy efficiency through the 1980s and ‘90s (Broadbent, 1999 ; Gilson, 2021; Imura and Schreurs, eds., 2005). This culminated in Japan hosting the pivotal United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP3 meeting in Kyoto 1997 and the subsequent operationalisation of the Kyoto Protocol by—currently—192 countries. Pointedly, this includes South Korea, as well as other East Asian states such as China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, that also have had a difficult historical relationship with Japan at various times. Hence, multilateral cooperation does appear here to have more potential than highly publicised direct high-level government talks between major (and antagonistic) participants, partly because there is no requirement to negotiate directly. Nevertheless, global treaties are necessarily general agreements that by design are unable to provide frameworks for addressing region-specific questions.
 
Kyoto was 27 years ago. Since then, the last time Japan has played a significant role in global environmental diplomacy was the hosting of the Convention on Biological Diversity COP10 in Nagoya in 2010, which produced the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing—with 137 parties currently signed up—and the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. More recently, however, global decision-making is dominated by the US, China, and the EU, with Japan participating less, due both to shifting international circumstances and its post-Fukushima choices (Gilson, 2021).
 
China’s ascendancy in global environmental diplomacy emerged at Paris in 2015, out of a combination of its own economic expansion, and Japan’s post-Fukushima fallback opening a systemic gap. This was consolidated by its hosting the COP15 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), originally scheduled for 2020 in Kunming. China’s role there included not only hosting, but as President it took ownership of shaping the post-Aichi targets. Delayed by a year due to the covid pandemic and shared with Montreal, the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Targets for 2030 underscore a shift in Asian leadership in environmental diplomacy that had become obvious in 2015 at COP21 in Paris, where the US, China, and EU dominated, and Japan had a more cautious presence. Intertwined as it is with Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and pivot to a “Green BRI” (Sun et al, 2023), this development raises concerns that China is taking an instrumental and developmental approach to environmental policy and diplomacy, in keeping with the position it had taken in Paris. Hence, regional cooperation can also help to regulate international partners and prevent a monopolising of environmental leadership for shoring up domestic legitimacy (Li et al, 2023).
 
The second named author of this article, Dr Peter Matanle, attended COP21 in Paris as a registered academic observer and presenter, and was present throughout the second week, mingling and discussing the convention’s developments with other attendees, including diplomats, media representatives, fellow academics and scientists, NGO and corporate delegates, lawyers, and lobbyists.

Image 1. Dr Peter Matanle in the Blue Zone as a registered academic observer at the Paris COP21 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015.

I had been invited by the Japanese delegation to convene and present a side-event panel at the Japanese Pavilion on 10 December 2015 (Details online here), and three things stood out from my experience inside the Blue Zone during that time.
 
First was Japan’s, for me, surprisingly muted role, under criticism for its post-Fukushima fossil fuel dependency and its contradictory position vis-à-vis exporting coal technologies to developing countries while simultaneously contributing to global climate finance. This surprised me, because I had been resident in Japan at different times before, during, and after the Kyoto talks, and had followed it closely. The prevailing academic and media discourse until then had presented Japan as a global leader in environmental remediation.
 
Second was China’s ambivalence over the inevitability of its rise to prominence. At Kyoto in 1997 China was not an Annex I developed country and was not expected to take a lead in emissions reduction, instead participating alongside other developing countries via the Clean Development Mechanism. By 2015, however, China’s economy and emissions had grown so large that Annex I countries and others were pressuring it into taking a leading role, even as it was trying to retain its designation as a developing country. Having been pushed into taking global leadership, China then used the opportunity to try to shape the agreement to its own needs. While the Paris Agreement introduced the requirement for Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) from all signatories, it retained the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), though in more nuanced form, which was established in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and reiterated in Kyoto. This placed additional pressure on China to contribute more as the world’s largest emitter, but simultaneously gave China leeway to assert its developing country status to continue with coal-dependent economic development (See: Bodansky, 2015; Carlson et al, 2021; and Hurri, 2020).
 
Third was the role of the European Union and its then 28 individual member states in brokering the final agreement to make efforts to limit the global temperature increase to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” (United Nations, 2015: Article 2); between the USA and China on the one hand, who were pushing for two degrees, and the Small Island Developing States on the other, who were insisting on a firm commitment to a maximum rise of 1.5 degrees. Had the EU and its member states not worked together so effectively at that moment, the Paris Agreement may not have been brought to a successful conclusion. Indeed, to get the agreement, the French organisers under President François Hollande and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius even resorted to changing the clocks inside the Blue Zone to extend the negotiations and ‘pretend’ that the agreement had been signed within the prescribed time limit.

Japan and South Korea have both been affected by China’s assertive foreign and trade policies. They also recognise the global strategic importance of carbon neutrality; Japan expressing this through then Prime Minister Suga’s 26 October 2020 net-zero declaration,  a notable departure from predecessor Abe Shinzō’s lukewarm approach to energy and emissions policy, and South Korea’s passing of the Framework Act on Carbon Neutrality and Green Growth in September 2021 in the face of interwoven climate and geopolitical crises affecting global energy prices (Cabinet Office of Japan, 2020; Herrador et al, 2022; Home-Dixon et al, 2015; Statutes of the Republic of Korea, 2021). However, they are yet to develop a solid partnership for constructive progress bilaterally. As the two most powerful liberal democratic societies in East Asia with the economic power and technical capabilities for leadership, Japan and Korea’s potential for collaboration in tackling environmental challenges holds significant implications for global environmental governance and regional stability.
 
The necessarily global nature of the UN COP meetings, coupled with the insufficiency of national and subnational approaches in tackling an inherently transboundary global environmental emergency, compels us to consider the role of regional and bilateral environmental cooperation, particularly where countries in protracted conflict or diplomatically antagonistic situations lack capacities and motivations for transnational environmental action, and where cooperation can in turn contribute to resolving disputes, creating a win-win outcome for nature and humanity (Asheim and Froyn, 2006; Dresse et al., 2018). A gap emerges, therefore, in Japan-South Korea environmental diplomacy in the need to produce more significant outcomes together than can be accomplished individually, and thereby contribute more to environmental remediation overall. In this regard, Haddad observes how, individually, East Asian countries contribute globally in many areas of environmental policymaking, though there remain obstacles to intergovernmental cooperation (Haddad, 2023).
 
Hence, in this context, environmental cooperation emerges as a critical opportunity for Japan and Korea to overcome historical grievances and build a framework for a new era in East Asia by leveraging their common democratic values, economic and technological strengths, public willingness, and political capacities, for jointly addressing the global environmental emergency and, simultaneously to (re)assert democratic institutions and processes as the principal method for addressing the foremost challenge of our age.

Background to Japan-Korea Environmental Relations

Our focus here is on Japan-Korea environmental cooperation. Without wishing to emulate Japan and South Korea ourselves in getting bogged down in the history wars, we do need to provide some brief background to the two countries’ environmental relations before presenting our analysis.
 
Overall, and despite not engaging in violent conflict since the end of the Japanese colonial administration in 1945, Japan-Korea relations appear permanently strained and prone to periodic breakdown, providing little foundation for the establishment of stable long-term constructive bilateral action to address a range of shared environmental challenges (Cooney and Scarbrough, 2008). Historical disagreements over Japan’s colonial and wartime record keep resurfacing, among other reasons because talk of that legacy was suppressed in Korea during the period of military rule (Soderberg, 2011), or because of Japan’s inability to deal with its own political agitators (Nakano, 2016).
 
Globally, the nexus between environment and international relations began to be identified from the 1960s (Hardt, 2017). At that time, it was considered in Malthusian terms, with the potential for resource scarcity to result in conflict, a fear that remains to this day (Hardin, 1968; Meadows et al, 1972). Despite intuitive conceptual associations between peace and environment surfacing in the anti-Vietnam War protests and hippie movements of the 1960s and ’70s, these did not mature and penetrate international relations discourse and policy. Indeed, their idealism was ridiculed at the time. It was only towards the end of the Cold War that interest in the environment and security relationship began to develop (Ide et al, 2023), although the mature concept of what is known today as environmental security wouldn’t emerge until the work of Thomas Homer-Dixon and the Toronto School (Homer-Dixon, 1999), again in the context of violence from scarcity.
 
Although Johan Galtung first coined the term ‘peacebuilding’ in 1976 (Galtung, 1976), and the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment of 1972 stressed the destructive nature of human conflict for the environment, only later did positive associations between environmental and human development emerge at the policy making level at the 1997 Rio Earth Summit. Then, from the early 2000s, the environment began to be considered seriously in international relations circles as a source of mutually constructive cooperation between states and peoples in conflictual or antagonistic relationships; what we now call environmental peacemaking or peacebuilding (Conca and Dabelko eds., 2002; Ide et al., 2021).
 
This roughly coincided with South Korea’s democratic transition that achieved the first transfer of power to a President without any ties to the former authoritarian regime in 1998. Then, in 2000 the newly elected President Kim Dae-jung spearheaded an environmental initiative with North Korea in 2000 on reforestation (UN Peacemaker, 2000). Similar initiatives with Japan, however, didn’t follow.
 
The maturing democratisation in Korea also allowed for the blossoming of the truth and reconciliation movement over the colonial period and the postwar military dictatorships of Park Chung-hee (1961-1979) and Chun Doo-hwan (1980-1987) (Suh, 2013). Then, disclosures about the role of Japan in the Korean Peninsula and their Korean collaborators who had links to many elite figures and institutions, led to renewed tensions as a delayed response to what was a suppressed history in South Korea (Soderberg, 2011). Seeking restitution from Japan came to dominate Japan-Korea dialogue and their bilateral relations from 2005 (Lynn, 2022).
 
Kimura charts the different stages of Korea’s historical development and Japan’s grievances (Kimura, 2011). In the immediate postwar period, Korean media frequently criticised Japan regarding compensation and their wartime record. That changed from the 1960s and ’70s under the Park Chung-hee regime. Consequently, lingering historical issues intersect strongly with the unresolved legacies stemming from Korea’s own period of authoritarian rule.
 
Hence, in the process of coming to terms with its own history, many of the details of both the colonial and post-colonial periods are only recently coming to light as a delayed reaction following Korea’s authoritarian period. This has spurred powerful citizen and NGO-led campaigns for recognition and compensation, which inevitably produce clashes with Japan. It was in 2018, for example, that the South Korean Supreme Court ruled that Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel were culpable for wartime forced labour and that they owed compensation. Mitsubishi rejected the court’s jurisdiction and former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō reacted with an undeclared trade war in 2019 (McCormack and Wada, 2022).
 
Frosty relations have recently begun to be repaired but the prospect of a full rapprochement is distant, so soon after the 100-year anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake, fire, and massacre (Haag, 2023). History therefore remains a regular source of contention between the two (Easley, 2023) and the conflicting attitude over the legacy of the colonial period has become heavily politicised in both Japan and Korea with a particular intensity over the last ten years. Historical grievances can then be weaponised by domestic political actors and tie together several other disputes related to territorial disputes (BBC, 2012), commercial competition (Sugihara, 2019), and rows over UNESCO status (Gil, 2021). All of this conspires to sabotage much of their current bilateral relations and make the wide-ranging agreements necessary to progress with environmental protection more difficult to achieve.
 
While to our knowledge there are no comprehensive studies on Japan-Korea environmental cooperation, research on individual non-state projects provides insight into past projects (Yoshimatsu, 2010). This is helpful in demonstrating the potential for both countries to work together over areas of joint concern. However, much work remains focused exclusively on the inter-governmental relationship, and tripartite or multilateral agreements between China, Korea, and Japan. Yet it is well known, for example, that transnational NGOs and domestic non-state actors can and do contribute to national environmental policy and governance (Nasiritousi, 2019). It is therefore important not to overlook the role of non-state actors when examining relations between open and relatively pluralistic democratic societies, as they, too, can form collaborative cross-border relationships independently and cooperatively with their own state apparatus.
 
Hence, bilateral commercial relations also need to be considered since, next to governments and supranational organisations, corporations are the most powerful non-state actors over environmental issues, both in terms of the damage that arises from their activities, and the financial and technological resources they can mobilise towards environmental restoration. In addition, corporations are coming under greater pressure to align their operations with international agreements on environmental cooperation and align their behaviours with changing investor and lender preferences on environment-related financial risk (Gallucci et al, 2019).
 
Finally, environmental issues are inherently transboundary, with many processes hardly susceptible to independent policies aimed at within country outcomes (MOFA, 2024). As identified above, they can also act as a threat multiplier and national security risk (USDOD, 2010). Hence, just as environmental peacebuilding can produce synergistic outcomes from the intersection between international relations and environmental restoration, so the opposite—not cooperating—may contribute to a cascade of spiralling negative political and environmental outcomes. Global heating can have dramatic effects on agricultural yield, for example, with socio-economic spillover effects such as migration weakening already fragile democratic political systems and relationships. Rising sea levels, oceanic warming and acidification, and over-fishing can threaten the viability of small island and coastal settlements, pushing countries to compete over dwindling marine resources.
 
Conversely, environmental cooperation, which can act as a powerful mitigating factor for building and maintaining resilience, is increasingly embraced globally, and becoming an important part of regional intergovernmental relations. But transboundary action can be made more effective if local information and responses are effectively coordinated within an overarching and inclusive bilateral or regional policy framework (Shiroyama, 2007). While there has been a significant growth in the number of multilateral forums for environmental cooperation and exchange in East and Southeast Asia, much is narrowly focused on economic relations (Yoo and Kim, 2015), and the extent to which agreements are sustainable remains contentious (Komori, 2010).
 
Hence, we adopt an inclusive approach to examining environmental cooperation between Japan and South Korea, acknowledging the importance of multiple possible arenas for action, and coordination between them. The state has enormous power to establish and fund joint projects and, crucially, provide policy frameworks sustained for the long-term by bilateral and regional treaties. Below we describe and analyse Japan-Korea environmental relations in four arenas of potential cooperation.

Four Arenas of Japan-South Korea Environmental Cooperation

For the remainder of this article, we examine four arenas of potential environmental cooperation between Japan and South Korea. What becomes evident from our survey is that, while cooperative activity indeed exists in all four arenas, there is an absence of comprehensive regional or bilateral framework treaties organised at the national government-to-government level which would provide direction and impetus for a coherent and comprehensive response to the overlapping and intersecting global, regional, and local environmental crises. This lacuna radiates outwards, affecting all areas of potential action that themselves already lack direction, coordination, and cohesion, with the consequence that the total collective response is insufficient for Japan and Korea to play their parts in addressing the gravity and urgency of the global emergency.
 
Within this context, the fragmented nature of environmental cooperation between Japan and South Korea, outlined below, becomes apparent. As two of the world’s largest economies located in the most economically dynamic region in the world, both possess the resources and capacities to tackle domestic, regional, and global challenges. Yet, neither is responding with the necessary urgency and commitment, given that their combined historical greenhouse gas emissions rank Japan and South Korea as the fifth and ninth largest emitters worldwide since the pre-industrial period (1850-2022) (Vigna et al., 2024), and Yale University’s 2024 Environmental Performance Index places them at 27th and 57th respectively, among 180 countries ranked on 58 indicators (Block et al., 2024).
 
We first explore regional cooperation at the supranational level where, after more than two decades of discussion, and despite instances of environmental collaboration, trilateral forums between China, Japan, and South Korea have failed to establish lasting institutions. At global forums such as the UN COP meetings on climate and biodiversity, Japan and Korea and other East Asian partners have indeed cooperated, despite historical grievances. However, cooperation here is facilitated by the fact that direct dialogue is not a necessary part of the negotiation process, with discussions being run through the host country’s coordinating offices. Here, Japan and Korea are not purposively cooperating bilaterally, other than within the larger whole.
 
Then the next two subsections present evidence from the closely interconnected arenas of inter-governmental and industrial and commercial cooperation, with the former being a heavy influence on how the latter participants conduct cross-border trade and investment through the operation of various legislative and regulatory mechanisms. Challenges to cooperation in these two arenas were most acute during the 2019-2022 trade dispute, with the partial and contested rapprochement agreements between President Yoon and then Prime Minister Kishida in 2023 highlighting the ongoing difficulties in repairing bilateral commercial and diplomatic environmental relations. Currently relations are in hiatus, with a possible reversal of recent progress, as Japan elects a new Prime Minister and South Korea’s political crisis following the martial law declaration is ongoing.
 
South Korea’s domestic political turmoil is yet to be resolved. At the time of writing, the Constitutional Court has confirmed Yoon’s impeachment on April 4th and new elections will be held on June 3rd 2025 (National Election Commission of the Republic of Korea, 2025). The leader of the progressive opposition party, Lee Jae-myeong, has been uncompromising in his opposition to closer ties with Japan and even the United States. Lee blames the US for allowing Japan to annex Korea following the Taft-Katsura Agreement in 1905. Lee has further commented that Japan is a “Militarily hostle state” and characterised the April 2024 election which he narowly lost to Yoon as a “New Japan-Korea war.” All of this suggests that 20th Century historical greivances will remain a source of contention with Japan during a Lee Jae-myeong administration.
 
Our fourth sub-section then presents examples of cooperation between Japanese and Korean NGOs and citizen groups, before concluding the article. We find that while these have established relationships, their capacity for producing meaningful change is limited when working independently of government and, like commercial relations, tend to echo inter-governmental political ruptures as and when these occur.

Cooperation through Supranational and Regional Forums

Japan and Korea’s bilateral relationship can be subject to intense scrutiny at the domestic level, producing frequent and periodic ruptures which cascade out to affect other areas of their relationship (Kimura, 2011). At the multilateral supranational level, however, environmental cooperation suffers less from conflation with historical issues, partly because there is less requirement to engage directly in reaching a successful outcome. This makes inter-state dialogue easier to sustain and it is through this form of cooperation that we see precedents for Japan and South Korea to act internationally in global environmental remediation. Nevertheless, despite years of talks at the multilateral level there remains a lack of institutional infrastructure for managing joint responses to region-specific environmental challenges.
 
Beginning in 1988, the Japan-Korea Environmental Symposium began as a bilateral, then became a multilateral, initiative whose main purpose was environmental monitoring and information exchange, with the potential for encouraging regional environmental cooperation (Komori, 2010). Talks continued through to the June 1992 Rio Summit and in October of the same year the inaugural meeting of the Northeast Asian Conference on Environmental Cooperation (NEAC) was held in Niigata, Japan. Japan and Korea were joined by three other participating countries: China, Russia, and Mongolia. There would be 15 further meetings by 2007 and the reorganisation of the body as the Northeast Asian Conference on Environmental Cooperation. Of those 15 meetings, 12 would be held in Japan and Korea with 6 in different cities in each country, respectively, although, as an international forum, it was devoted to exchanging information only (MOE, 2005). No institutions or frameworks emerged from these meetings.
 
Between 1993 and 1994, Japan and Korea also joined the North-East Asia Sub-Regional Program for Environmental Cooperation (NEASPEC) (NEASPEC, 2024), The Northwest Pacific Action Plan (NOWPAP) (NOWPAP, 2024) and the Partnership in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia (PEMSEA). Furthermore, issue specific organisations such as the Acid Deposition Monitoring Network in East Asia (EANET) and Regional Technical Assistance on Dust and Sandstorm (DSS-RETA) demonstrated that they were willing to cooperate on specific issues that could only be tackled on a transboundary regional basis. Once again, and despite acknowledging the presence of region-specific issues that require addressing in multilateral regional forums, once China had begun mitigating the acid rain problem, these discussions failed to produce spillover benefits in terms of wider cooperation among participants (Akimoto et al., 2022).
 
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Japan established itself as an international leader on environmental issues (Sakaguchi, 2011). The Environment Agency created a ‘Global Environment Department’ to foster environmental diplomacy and from 1990 to 1995 overseas development aid to China and Southeast Asia began to recognise green projects (Karan, 2010). In 1991; the ‘Green Aid Plan’ was launched with the backing of overseas development assistance (ODA) funds and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). It was designed to improve regional air quality by facilitating the sharing of clean coal technology to combat acid rain with countries throughout the Asia-Pacific (Evans, 1999). As stated, hosting of the COP3 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1997 and the Kyoto Protocol allowed Japan to emphasise its global leadership on environmental issues that had been established in the 1970s and ’80s with progress on industrial resource efficiency in the wake of the oil crises (Broadbent, 1998), and which was sustained through to hosting the Convention of Biological Diversity COP10 in Nagoya in 2010, and the signing of the Nagoya Protocol and agreement on the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.
 
Nevertheless, there has since been a reduction in Japan’s leadership within East Asia on global environmental issues, taking a backseat to the EU during negotiations that would lead to the 2015 Paris Agreement, for example, and on several occasions acting even as a restraining influence (Sakaguchi et al, 2020). This was compounded by Japan’s nuclear shutdowns following the Fukushima meltdowns, which forced Tokyo to fall back on fossil fuels (Matanle, 2011). Concurrently, coupled with Japan’s retreat from global leadership, China has progressively been pushed into assuming a greater role in international environmental agreements, acting as de facto East Asian leader by virtue of its economic size and resulting environmental damage. China is hesitant to accept this role because its status as a developing country allows more leeway in setting greenhouse gas emissions restrictions through the Nationally Determined Contributions mechanism set up at Paris in 2015. But it has also presented Beijing with an opportunity to shape international agreements, and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022 is a demonstration of how China has gradually taken advantage of its newfound influence. This is also spurring the integration of a green dimension into China’s international Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Li et al, 2018). Hence, as the international community pushes China to adopt a leadership role in East Asia on climate and biodiversity issues, Japan’s voice and a democratic approach to managing the environmental emergency in the region are further diminished.
 
The most significant forum for supranational regional cooperation which survives to this day is the Tripartite Environment Ministers Meetings (TEMM) between China, Japan, and South Korea, which had been kick-started by Japan-Korea cooperation on acid rain in the 1990s. Both had identified China as a major source of the problem, and they consequently worked together to encourage Beijing to participate in talks, one of the fruits of which was the TEMM. These meetings began in 1999 following nearly a decade of Japanese environmental aid and technology transfers to China, and amid the beginning of a turn towards international environmental issues by the new Korean President Kim Dae-jung. Japanese and Korean cooperation was therefore vital to achieving success, as it allowed the two better to balance China, which by the late 1990s was a major contributor to regional acid rain (Schreurs and Pirages, 1998).
 
The TEMM talks have endured despite the many tensions between the three countries over security and economic relations in the 21st Century, with TEMM 24 in 2023 (MOE, 2024).

The meetings have reached a formal status within each country’s environmental ministries, empowering the TEMM with the power formally to request action of individual environment ministries (Yuan and Lee, 2023). As such, the body can now cooperate with external stakeholders such as national government ministries, NGOs, and private organisations, but TEMM has no formal ability to engage in concrete environmental action itself.
 
Hence, formal institutions have not been established and the reliance on goodwill to sustain TEMM ensures that nothing permanent or binding has yet been agreed upon (Yuan and Lee, 2023). There are therefore serious questions regarding the real-world efficacy of TEMM agreements with, for example, the announcement to take joint action over fine dust in 2014 leading to few discernible improvements (Zhang, 2024). Consequently, urgent transboundary ecological issues such as the heavily polluted Yellow Sea have not been addressed through the TEMM. For Japan and Korea, the TEMM has become a politically safer surrogate for direct Japan-Korea bilateral environmental cooperation whereby the presence of China only guarantees that the two cannot unite to develop a stronger voice.

Japan-Korea Bilateral Intergovernmental Environmental Cooperation

The 1993 Japan-Korea Environmental Conservation Cooperation Agreement was the beginning of a formal policy dialogue on environmental issues between the two countries (International Affairs Office Ministry of Environment, 2004), but it wasn’t until 1995 that the new Joint Committee on Environmental Cooperation had its first formal meeting (MOE, 2024). Although focused narrowly on air pollution and acid rain, it would not be until the seventh dialogue from 2001 that discussions branched off into other areas of joint environmental concern. In addition, according to the 1993 agreement, the schedule for these meetings was never fixed. Up to 1998, just three had taken place, and it was not until 1999 that plans for 32 new joint projects were agreed upon (MOE, 2024). High level bilateral intergovernmental environmental cooperation between Japan and Korea is therefore a 21st century phenomenon.
 
This might seem surprising considering Japan’s post-1945 democratisation and South Korea’s transition to democracy in 1987. However, for Korea the first democratic handover of power to a figure independent of ties to the former authoritarian military regime did not take place until 1998. In that year, the new presidency of Kim Dae-jung began a landmark repeal of controls on Japanese cultural imports into the Republic of Korea (Rozman and Lee, 2006). This was a significant move as even travel restrictions to Japan were only fully lifted in 1989. The fact that President Kim himself regarded the repeal as a moment to “Open up without fear” (The Korea Herald, 2023) was illustrative of the level of mistrust that still existed.
 
Kim Dae-jung again pioneered meetings with Japanese PM Obuchi in October 1998 that secured an agreement to cooperate on emissions reductions in Article 9 (MOFA, 1998) of their joint declaration “A New Japan-Republic of Korea Partnership towards the Twenty-first Century” (MOFA, 1998). However, environmental cooperation remains a peripheral or secondary issue in relation to Japan’s and Korea’s main economic and security interests (Nilsson-Wright, 2024). It was only because of the transboundary nature of environmental threats such as acid rain, air, and marine pollution that the place of the environment in their bilateral relations was given attention. That was why their joint research projects in the early 2000s were focused narrowly on pollution issues (MOE, 2024). Even when meetings would go on to expand into related regional environmental issues such as desertification and marine biodiversity, these were timebound talks and lacked cohesion. This sort of piecemeal cooperation was sustained over a period of more than 20 years until the 2019 dispute, but has left little legacy because no long-term institutions were established, and positive environmental outcomes have been limited.
 
When air pollution became a major issue in Korea from the early 2000s, Korea did not seek collaboration with Japan, but instead dealt with China on a bilateral basis. Although air quality has improved over Seoul since 2005, that has been mainly due to domestic reforms as Korea itself is a major contributor to the problem. To date, air pollution in Korea remains a major point of contention with China and diplomacy has been undermined by difficulties in their bilateral relations (Zhang, 2024). The improvements in Korean air quality are instead the result of stricter domestic reforms and following EU standards (Ho et al, 2021). Checking air quality status has now become a routine daily reality for South Koreans, demonstrating the limitations of what even advanced East Asian economies such as Korea can achieve in isolation.
 
There are also instances when Japanese and Korean state agencies operate closely on overseas development projects in third countries. The Korea Development Institute (KDI) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), for example, are collaborating in providing development assistance in several Central Asian countries (Murashkin and Varpahovskis, 2022). Much like multilateral cooperation, these comparatively little-known projects do not involve institution building in Japanese or Korean territory, so have more freedom to develop collaborative relationships. However, even in this instance there is no evidence of cooperation evolving into a ‘Spill-over effect’ in which development cooperation could then act as a template for greater environmental cooperation (Conca and Dalbeko, 2002). Projects are time bound, isolated one-offs that provide no opportunity for deeper connections to be established, leading to future cooperation, and are focused on delivering economic and industrial development opportunities, which potentially run counter to an environmental agenda.
 
Hence, environmental initiatives between Japan and South Korea have been dependent on the maintenance of good diplomatic relations. When those relations break down, as they did in 2019, they have withered for want of sustained inter-governmental dialogue and resources. The 21st Japan-Korea dialogue meeting to be held in Japan in 2019 never materialised, for example, and 12 years of what had become regular annual meetings beginning in 2006 disappeared (MOE, 2024). There was no independent institutional infrastructure made up of jointly run agencies, or projects, that could avoid their quick suspension by central governments. Japan then withdrew their ambassador to Korea following the visit by Lee Myung-bak to the Dokdo / Takeshima Islands. This ratcheting-up of tensions would continue till the second half of 2023, as historical disputes increasingly became a bilateral political football. To this day, the way the Japanese and Korean governments conduct their relations is fraught with tension and dysfunction (Lynn, 2022, p292). As such, environmental cooperation from dialogue to establishing joint institutions to managing and overseeing long-running projects have been repeatedly undermined.

Japan-South Korea Commercial and Industrial Cooperation

Commercial ties have been the core of Japan and Korea’s modern bilateral relations (Nem, 2023) since they were normalised in 1965 by former authoritarian ruler Park Chung-hee. We detail below the background of their industrial ties to explain why relations with Japan focused on economic development, largely to the exclusion or peripheralisation of other arenas of cooperation. Traditionally, the industrial partnership has led to environmental degradation that in the interests of development have been sidelined by central governments. This spirit of economic pragmatism is also why environmental ties by commercial entities are not part of a broader rapprochement between Japan and Korea. It has continued to the present day and the projects we identify illustrate how environmentally-beneficial outcomes, even after 2000, have been transactional, and tangential to any broader framework or policy direction. Hence, industry-to-industry cooperation is environmental strategy-free and occurs between individual companies seeking economic opportunities in a globalising world rather than as a coordinated set of initiatives set within a treaty framework.
 
The place of industry in Japan-Korea relations has been important since the 1965 Basic Treaty, which itself set the subsequent pattern by focusing mainly on economic and infrastructure development. This was the opening phase of Korea and Japan’s modern relations at a time when the external threat posed by the powerful if divided Communist bloc in East Asia seemed ascendant (Cha, 1999). Japan was in the midst of its long postwar economic boom, and South Korea was still recovering from the Korean War. Park served in the Japanese military during the occupation and wanted to model Korean economic development on Japan’s example; it was also for this reason that his Japanese service record and name were suppressed in Korea (Kim and Vogel, 2013).
 
Relations were further solidified when on New Year’s Day in 1973, the Park regime declared its intention to pivot from light manufacturing to a ‘Heavy chemicals and industry’ (HCI) development initiative taking direct inspiration from Japan’s successful example (Kim, 2004). Korea was still a developmental state, and the resources of industry were tightly controlled by government technocrats (Kim, 2004). Japanese and Korean industrial partnerships were export oriented in the service of purposive accelerated economic development.

Image 2. South Korean President Park Chung-hee with Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato during talks at the Blue House in June 1967.

Park’s announcement came at an opportune time for Japan’s corporations, which were interested in offshoring due to increasing pressure from domestic environmental concerns arising from recent pollution disasters (Yang, 2023). In 1970, Japan’s ‘Pollution Diet’ saw fourteen environmental laws passed in a single session, mostly concerned with industrial pollution (Suzuki, 2000), among which the ‘polluter pays’ principle became law, and the Environment Agency was established (Matanle, 2020; Murphey and Murphey, 1984). To mitigate public criticism, Korea provided a convenient location for Japanese companies to offshore, where they were to become known as ‘Pollution industries’ (Kim, 2023).
 
Park’s opening of Korea to Japanese investment and cooperation with Korean Chaebol conglomerates inaugurated the first wave of commercial ties and led to major Japanese FDI inflows (Kim, 2017). Throughout the decade, Japanese corporations were to become the second largest foreign investors in South Korea, after the United States. Almost 1000 Japanese ventures were launched, becoming a core component of Park’s successful export-led industrialisation (Kim, 2023). Eventually, however, Korean industry would also be plagued by much of the same environmental issues as Japan, and by 1985 revelations of their own contamination incidents were coming to the public’s attention (Ku, 2011).
 
Echoing similar movements in Japan two decades earlier, grassroots environmental civic groups then put increasing pressure on government and industry for greater environmental protections. By the mid-1990s, Korea and Japan had become active in passing legislation to support anti-pollution measures and developing new green technologies, independently of each other. For example, in 2005 Korea passed the Act on the Promotion of Purchase of Green Products which followed swiftly on from similar legislation in Japan (MOE, 2000). The drive for low carbon ‘Green Growth’ and Green Public Procurement (GPP) in the first decade of the 21st Century later encouraged industry to support international sustainable consumption and production targets (UNEP, 2019).
 
Yet, progress on developing stable ties is vulnerable to repeated rows over various Japan-Korea disputes. Japan’s colonial and wartime legacy remained, and industrial giants such as Mitsubishi were tied to using coerced Korean labour during World War Two. It was this issue and the decision by the Korean Supreme Court in 2018 to compel Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel to pay reparations that led to the drawdown in relations (Kim et al, 2023). During this eruption in their relations, former PM Abe Shinzō took South Korea off its whitelist of trusted trading nations in 2019 (Sugihara, 2019) and added export controls to chemicals crucial for Korea’s semiconductor manufacturing industry (Foreign Policy, 2020). This, in turn, compelled Korean businesses to reorganise supply chains and the suspension of flight routes to Japan (Kim, 2020), badly affecting Japan-Korea business-to-business relations (Financial Times, 2019).
 
In 2023, President Yoon and Prime Minister Kishida attempted to repair their relations by addressing outstanding historical grievances, securing from Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel a $1.5 million compensation package. The reparations deal involved Korean companies paying compensation to victims while Japanese companies provide funds for investment opportunities and joint R&D projects. This was used to create the ‘Future Partnership Fund’ and is now jointly run by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) and Japan Business Federation (MCST, 2023). However, these initiatives have not had a lasting impact in South Korea and have been derided along with Yoon’s entire Japan strategy (Brookings, 2023).
 
Today, as both Korea and Japan progress with carbon neutrality, Japanese and Korean corporations have sought to become environmental innovators in areas such as green energy (S&P Global, 2021) and recycling (KED Global, 2024), demonstrating a parallel expertise in climate transition and waste technologies. In 2023, Samsung and Chiyoda Corporation signed an agreement on green hydrogen technology (KED Global, 2023), and the Japanese and Korean governments announced their intention to develop cooperation in hydrogen energy (Korea Times 2023). Korea’s POSCO is developing grey, blue, and green hydrogen energy technologies (POSCO, Newsroom, 2018) and has secured international contracts for green hydrogen projects, while Hyundai (The Korea Herald, 2023) and Mitsubishi (Mandra, 2023) are also independently developing plans for CO2 carriers in some of their largest Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) projects to date. However, thus far these are only semi-related to environmental issues and are more specifically focused on the economic opportunities of energy transition. There is no evidence of a shared direction and coherent purpose under a coordinated plan of action.
 
Although Japan-Korea industrial cooperation does have the capacity to become more developed than currently, relational disruptions make sustained industrial partnerships difficult to maintain and thus incur higher investment risks. Ultimately, the resumption of relations from 2022 could just as easily be reversed, relying on the personalities of respective heads of government and the confluence of their own motivations as well as the weak authority of the current Korean and Japanese governments (Jung, 2023).

Cooperation among NGOs

Japan and Korea have some of the most dynamic citizen-led environmental movements in the Asian region, yet direct cross-border cooperation has been scant. The weaknesses of civil society in Japan and Korea are well attested and can explain some of the difficulties they have encountered, with NGOs only really emerging from the 1980s (Hirata, 2002). Networks of Japanese and Korean NGOs have succeeded in working together across borders, but due to their shared historical struggles with pollution incidents, this cooperation is usually concerned with specific local incidents, rather than with the larger global issues of climate change and biodiversity loss. They consequently lack the foundation for linking local, regional, and global environmental concerns, which would provide the conceptual basis for significant transboundary cooperation and generating effective action.
 
The methyl mercury released by Chisso at Minamata Bay, Japan, began a decades-long battle by grassroots civic groups before they were able to achieve recognition in 1968, and Minamata Disease was but one of several localised diseases that arose as a result of pollution incidents from the late-19th through the early to mid-20th centuries (Matanle, 2020). Indeed, a similar incident occurred in the mid-1980s in Korea because of suspected cadmium releases resulting in ‘Onsan Disease’ (Ku, 2011). This echoed the appearance of Itai-Itai Disease in Japan’s Toyama prefecture from 1912, which stemmed from cadmium contamination of the Jinzu river basin (Yoshida et al, 1999).
 
These incidents reveal the closely paralleled suffering both countries underwent during industrialisation and why civic movements were increasingly motivated to organise and strive for improved environmental protection. Grassroots civic groups in both countries have since gradually evolved into more organised NGOs such as the Kiko Network in Japan and large NGOs like the Korean Federation of Environmental Movements (KFEM) in Korea. By the 2000s, these became capable of waging successful campaigns against not only powerful business interests, but also to lobby and shape government policy (Schreurs, 2002).
 
This is borne out by the ability of such groups to persevere and establish small-scale and issue-specific forms of collaboration which are not affected by high political tensions to the same degree as national governments. Non-state actors such as citizen groups and nonprofits are supported by the enthusiasm and in many cases the volunteer efforts of their members. Their singular focus on environmental issues takes precedence and governments can act as an unwelcome restraining influence. South Korean NGOs for example were at the forefront of working with North Korea and have had battles with the central government over policy (Lee and Arrington, 2008; Moon, 2016).
 
On a multilateral basis, groups have been able to organise long-running knowledge sharing forums such as the ‘Asia-Pacific NGOs Environmental Conference’ (APNEC) which held meetings for over ten years. Small-scale projects and campaigns related to causes such as water quality (Go, 2015), biomass energy concerns (Sustainable Japan, 2021), marine pollution (Hankyoreh, 2023), and promoting exchange and dialogue (SNU IJS, 2024) have taken place. In 1995, the Kiko Network helped initiate the Atmospheric Action Network in East Asia (AANEA). However, without sustained support this too was discontinued from 2000 (Lee, 2001). 
 
The fact that so many of these have not been sustainable is partly a result of governments not sufficiently supporting NGOs and their lacking inclusivity (Yuan and Lee, 2023). There is also a structural obstacle to regional cooperation between Japanese and Korean civic groups that prevents them from forming a consensus at a scale necessary for NGOs to have greater regional influence. Today, Korea’s KFEM boasts thousands of supporters, hundreds of activists and dozens of member organisations as part of a broad coalition (KFEM, 2024), whereas in Japan, the Kiko Network is the country’s largest Environmental NGO, yet has a small staff of fewer than a dozen throughout the country (Haddad, 2020).
 
The character of Japanese environmental movements has roots dating back to the Ashio Copper Mine Disaster in 1880. This local pollution disaster occurred decades before the more well-known 20th century incidents, with pioneering activist and philosopher Tanaka Shōzō (1841-1913) resigning his seat in the Diet to take his protest directly to the Meiji Emperor. His tireless efforts eventually led to environmental reforms in 1911 through the landmark Factory Act (Stolz, 2006). Japanese civic groups have since then followed a similar pattern of mobilising primarily to bring national attention to local pollution incidents. Although large international organisations such as Greenpeace are active in the country, endogenously developed Japanese environmental groups themselves remain small in size and capacity.
 
Korea’s struggles with dictatorial regimes have made their NGOs more willing to be confrontational and risk antagonistic relations with the central government than groups in Japan (Lee and Arrington, 2008). That ethos has guided them in their bitter battles over the environmental legacy and effects of Korea’s Chaebol-led industrialisation from the 1990s onwards. An important pillar of the ideological rationale for the Korean environmental movement has been to hold the state to account for past wrongdoing during the authoritarian period (Haddad, 2021).
 
The Korean state has historically been unfriendly to NGOs and citizen groups as legal protections wouldn’t become guaranteed until 2000 (Assistance for Non-profit, Non-governmental Organisations Act, 2000) (Korea Legislation Research Institute, 2023). Of the 349 environmental groups that have been registered with the MOE, per the most recent 2023 release, only four date to before the June Revolution in 1987 (MOE, 2023) and democratisation, and 183 since 2000 (MOE, 2023). The Basic Treaty itself has long been a target for those who feel it betrayed Korea’s interests by Park’s dictatorial regime (Jeong and Shin, 2018). This has led some Korean groups including environmental NGOs into adopting a hostile stance towards Korean government policy seen as being too soft towards Japan. Their ties to the Democratic Party are naturally stronger due both to the suppression of NGOs and their desire to seek extensive reform (Chung and Kim, 2018). Domestic political dynamics can therefore also complicate their attitudes toward cooperation with Japan when rapprochement is being driven by an unpopular conservative administration (Kang and Herskovitz, 2024).
 
The intense politicisation of NGOs therefore complicates environmental cooperation when the high political relationship is also tense. Some of the most vociferous and hardline campaigners lobbying for Japanese recognition of past crimes have been from NGOs across many different sectors including environmental groups. Indeed, as such, NGOs have sometimes become a major stumbling block for Korean governments aiming to build better relations with Japan (Easley, 2023).
 
The danger of conflating history and environmental issues in Korea can be most clearly seen during the controversy over Japan’s tritium releases from Fukushima in 2023 (Reuters, 2023). KFEM itself had previously proposed to turn overlapping Korean and Japanese EEZs in the East Sea/Sea of Japan into a marine reserve (KFEM, 2022). However, environmental groups in Korea opposed the releases and have been at the forefront of campaigns criticising the rapprochement deals with Japan (Yonhap, 2023). Relations with Japan are now subject to severe political polarisation with the progressive Democratic Leader Lee Jae-myeong characterising President Yoon’s diplomacy as “subservience” to Japan (Yonhap, 2023). This political dimension is important as the opposition Democrats have traditionally enjoyed support from environmental groups. The former Democrat Mayor of Seoul passed the landmark One Less Nuclear Power Plant (OLNPP) policy and the nuclear power phase out was a key pledge during the Moon presidency (Chung and Kim, 2018).

Conclusion

While evidence exists of environmental cooperation between Japan and Korea at the state level, efforts are insufficient for the nature of the task, often set within bounded time frames, and lack comprehensive frameworks for directed and coordinated action among multiple partners towards synergistic outcomes. Consequently, there is considerable scope for more open-ended and comprehensive cooperation between the two neighbours, backed by heads of government, with significant investment towards ambitious outcomes that, in addition, provide a robust liberal democratic alternative to the authoritarian leadership in East Asia that is by default being assumed by China.
 
Although environmental cooperation between Japan and Korea is taking place in some areas beyond the state, it is piecemeal and insufficient for addressing the grave and urgent threats pressing in on their shared environment. In this context, the protracted difficulties in bilateral intergovernmental relations do not produce the sort of direction via either a comprehensive environmental agreement or an international treaty that other actors could benefit from slotting themselves into. Taken together, we can conclude that the Japan and Korea response to the environmental emergency is uncoordinated and lacks the sort of cohesive sense of direction necessary to deal with the environmental emergency at a level sufficient for the task.
 
The connections between intergovernmental and industrial cooperation are notable, because cooperation among industrial partners has even been undermined by tensions between national governments, most seriously between 2019-22. Where cooperation between Japanese and Korean corporations does take place, these are by and large profit focused initiatives that are directed by financial imperatives rather than addressing issues of environmental degradation for achieving remediation and restoration. Indeed, the greater legacy of Japan-Korean industrial cooperation has been environmental damage and contamination.
 
At the sub-national level, NGOs and citizen groups can talk and cooperate with their counterparts, but historical and territorial disputes prevent it blooming into something more substantial. There is a distinct lack of investment and access to collaborate with state agencies that leaves these projects relying on goodwill and favourable inter-state relations.
 
The History Wars are but one of several intractable and overlapping disputes that continue to overshadow relations between Japan and Korea, which have led to inertia in their bilateral relations and a persistent lack of urgency among their respective political and business leaders in confronting the global environmental emergency. Alongside every other country, Japan and Korea are at the precipice of experiencing serious challenges to their stability, security, and sustainability from an imminent 2°C-plus rise in global temperatures and widespread ecosystem collapse. Rather than spurring deeper cooperation between the two leading democracies of East Asia, environmental issues battle for attention from distracted and disinterested governments.
 
Instead of seeing the necessity of deep and multilevel cooperation over a problem that is beyond the capability of individual states to influence decisively, the governments and peoples of Japan and Korea allow historical and territorial disputes to continue to sour their relations. The unfolding environmental emergency ensures that global challenges will affect every facet of national policy, public life, and personal circumstances and wellbeing over the coming decades, which is why repairing the bilateral relationship and engaging in meaningful and substantive environmental cooperation is essential for strengthening mutual resilience.
 
Industry in both countries is pioneering green technologies, and domestically NGOs working on environmental issues have secured popular support. Even in the absence of direct bilateral engagement, non-state actors and businesses do find common ground to support one another. Intergovernmental cooperation can then energise the removal of bureaucratic hurdles, provide financial support, and incentivise a plurality of collaborative efforts. While historical issues will remain, politicians in Japan and Korea could better defend maintaining close ties if the rationale was linked explicitly to environmental conservation and restoration.
 
The progress that Japan and Korea individually or in multilateral negotiations have made on environmental issues is yet insufficient to make headway on reasserting regional leadership. The consequences are not just environmental, but geopolitical too. As environmental challenges grow in prominence through the course of the 21st century, vulnerable states will look for regional representation and see the leading democracies mired in 20th century historical disputes and failing to live up to their responsibilities. The resulting leadership vacuum compels China to take a greater leadership role, and, in doing so, increases the opportunity further to legitimise its authoritarian alternative to the environmental emergency in East Asia (Haug, 2024).
 
For Japan to regain regional environmental leadership it will need to cooperate closely with Korea. Together they have the requisite economic, technological, and diplomatic strengths to balance and engage China. Currently, the Japan-Korea estrangement hands China regional leadership. Indeed, East Asia’s response to the global environmental emergency depends on Japan and Korea fully mobilising their open, pluralistic, and democratic societies towards environmental cooperation.

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