The DPRK Energy Sector: Current Status and Future Engagement Options
This report discusses the history, current status, and potential future of the DPRK energy sector. The authors, drawing on the Nautilus Institute's decades of work on North Korea, describes the history of the DPRK energy sector, in particular changes in the sector since 1990. The study then looks at the current status and supply and demand balance of North Korea's energy sector noting the vulnerabilities and critical needs of that sector. The report also explores options for the rehabilitation of the DPRK energy sector that could be used in negotiations with North Korea as part of a 'roadmap' to denuclearization and legitimate energy needs if negotiations are not successful and the DPRK either collapses (due to an internal coup, succession crisis, or war) or continues to stagnate. The report concludes by identifying the robust strategies that are important in both engagement and non-engagement (collapse or stagnation) scenarios.
UNBEARABLE LEGACIES: THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION IN NORTH KOREA
Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote Enduring Legacies: Economic Dimensions of Restoring North Korea's Environment. This essay not only described a set of urgent environmental problems in North Korea, but also described its institutional and legal framework for environmental management. At the time, I had no idea that so many years would pass with no improvement in North Korea's situation. It has actually become far worse than I could then imagine. In 1994, I led a UN mission charged with helping North Korea to compile its first greenhouse gas emissions inventory for its national report under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which North Korea had signed. Part of the justification for providing Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding for greenhouse gas reduction projects in North Korea was the creation of other benefits such as biodiversity. For this reason, I was looking into reforestation in North Korea as a way to capture carbon from the air as a way to preserve and restore biodiversity. I was talking over dinner with the head of North Korea's biodiversity program about such a project. He offered to pour me a shot of liquor from a bottle containing a snake. I demurred but he insisted, saying the snake liquor for public sale was low grade whereas this one - a snake with a diamond head not a square one - was the real thing, made from a rare and endangered species!
NORTH KOREA'S INTERLOCKED ECONOMIC CRISES Some Indications from "Mirror Statistics"
For over a generation-more precisely, since the early 1960s-analysis of the performance of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK, or North Korea) economy has been severely limited by a prolonged and strictly administered "statistical blackout." Even by comparison with other deliberately closed societies in the modem era, the duration and extent of the DPRK's embargo on socioeconomic information is arguably unparalleled. At this juncture, in fact, not a single official data series relating to any aspect of the country's economic performance is being regularly released. Given the extraordinary success, by its own lights, of Pyongyang's campaign to suppress domestically collected information on its national economy, virtually the only new North Korean data regularly available concern the DPRK's international commerce, and come from reports by trade partners: figures known in the jargon as "mirror statistics." While these numbers are not without their limitations, they nonetheless can provide a basis by which to assess both the current state and the development over time of one consequential component of the North Korean economy-its external merchandise trade sector-and in addition offer an aperture through which to observe, and draw inferences about, broader conditions within the DPRK domestic economy.1