The Presidential Commission on Carbon Neutrality and Green Growth, which oversees the government’s roadmap for carbon neutrality, is seeking to create a think tank to support climate change policies.

The commission under the Office for Government Policy Coordination is a public-private joint organization that reviews and determines policy matters concerning the 2050 Carbon Neutral Basic Plan and the 2030 Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). The NDC is a non-binding national plan that highlights climate change mitigation, including climate-related targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions.

The commission placed an order for outside research on the establishment of a support organization like the IPCC of the United Nations at the end of last year, and the research is in final stages, people familiar with the matter told Maeil Business Newspaper on Tuesday.

The IPCC, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the UN’s intergovernmental body founded in 1988 for assessing the science related to climate change. It publishes a comprehensive assessment report containing the analysis of climate change trends, projections and impacts, and countermeasures.

In the research outline, the commission pointed out that Korea has no think tank organization to provide comprehensive support to the organization and existing support functions for carbon neutrality are currently scattered across affiliated organizations under each ministry, making it difficult to ensure independence from each ministry and continuous and integrated support.

Under the NDC program, Korea must reduce emissions by 4.17 percent annually to achieve a 40 percent cut by 2030 versus 2018. But the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 increased by 3.5 percent from the previous year to 679.6 million tons.

By Park Dong-hwan and Minu Kim

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