Nam Hyun-woo has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2013, mostly covering business and politics. He currently belongs to the Business Desk where he covers topics such as emerging tech, AI, ICT and Korea's chaebol community. Prior to joining the team, he was the paper's correspondent for the presidential office of Korea during the Yoon Suk Yeol and Moon Jae-in administrations.
New threats emerging to test Korea's crisis management capabilities
Graphic by Cho Sang-won
By Nam Hyun-woo
By Nam Hyun-woo
After grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic for the past two years, South Korea is increasingly recognizing that North Korea's nuclear program is not the only threat it faces, and that new risks can emerge and test the country's ability to manage new challenges.
The difficulties facing the country _ and the world _ have shown us that threats could come in unexpected forms and at unexpected times. Indeed, the risks could be strong enough to entirely change how people live and how society works. The pandemic, the climate crisis and network outages in hyper-connected Korea are already issues that pose a significant amount of concern.
A small business owner wears a “Younghee” mask, a doll from Netflix's series, "Squid Game," during a rally against the government's social distancing rules near the Government Complex Seoul, Dec. 22. Hundreds of small business owners rallied, calling for the withdrawal of curfews and other strict COVID-19 restrictions on restaurants, cafes, gyms and other facilities. AP-Yonhap
1. New epidemic after COVID-19
In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) selected a number of diseases that could pose the greatest public health risk due to their epidemic potential, and came up with the idea of “Disease X,” which “represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.”
In a contribution article in The Telegraph on May 18 of that year, Richard Hatchett, CEO of Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, wrote: “It might sound like science fiction, but Disease X is something we must prepare for.”
Just two years later, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted ways of life across the world, and the WHO is still keeping Disease X on its watch list. This means the organization believes there is a fair chance of another infectious disease becoming a full-blown pandemic, thereby posing a serious threat to mankind.
In a study submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S. on Aug. 31, a research team led by Marco Marani of the University of Padua in Italy asserted that the probability of experiencing a pandemic with similar impact to COVID-19 in one's lifetime is currently at about 38 percent, and this may double in the coming decades. The study also warned that the probability of novel disease outbreaks will likely grow threefold in the next few decades.
Against this backdrop, experts say people's reliance on vaccines and treatments will continue to grow, and so will the importance of technological preparedness, in which drug makers can develop vaccines and treatments quickly after an outbreak.
For example, it took a year for drug makers to come up with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, but this was an outcome of more than 30 years of research on mRNA technologies.
Since South Korea fell short on basic scientific research on the virus, the country could not take the lead in the global race for so-called vaccine sovereignty. However, a number of domestic drug developers have been working on their own mRNA platform technologies, and on Dec. 24, ST Pharm submitted a phase 1 trial application for Korea's first mRNA-type vaccine candidate to the domestic drug authority.
The Korean government is also bolstering its support and subsidies for drug makers to achieve President Moon Jae-in's initiative of making the country a regional vaccine manufacturing hub, in order to strengthen Korea's presence in the global vaccine supply chain.
However, questions remain as to whether political and economic attention on time and money-consuming research for vaccine technologies will continue as they have done in recent years.
Kenneth V. Iserson, professor emeritus in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Arizona, warned in his article titled “The Next Pandemic: Prepare for 'Disease X'”:
“As the COVID-19 threat lessens, politicians will make grand promises to implement plans to stop, or at least to prepare for, the next pandemic. The recovering economy will be too weak at first to support the effort, although more funding will be promised in the future,” Iserson wrote. “Politicians will ultimately make changes that are politically expedient and will fail to authorize the changes necessary to produce faster, more flexible responses. The memories of angst and societal disruption during COVID-19 will recede.”
Similar scenarios are anticipated in Korea, which will hold its presidential election in March.
Though the major candidates are now promising up to 100 trillion won ($84.2 billion) for a public disaster relief fund, which is equivalent to one-sixth of the country's total budget for 2022, and enhanced government responsibility for those suffering vaccine side effects, they have yet to come up with ideas on whether they will succeed Moon's vaccine hub initiative or how to prepare the country for Disease X.
A firefighter and citizens push a truck at an underpass in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province, as torrential rain floods the city on Aug. 24. Courtesy of Jeonbuk Fire Service
2. Climate change
Unlike some countries which have suffered frequent natural disasters fanned by climate change, Korea has not been quite as affected by large-scale natural disasters that would alarm the public about the issue.
Nonetheless, experts say the country is not a safe haven from the climate crisis, citing relatively small but noteworthy changes in the country's climate. They added the country could be shunned from global supply chains if it underestimates the pace of the global energy transition.
“With a record-breaking monsoon season and heat waves in recent years leading to casualties, property damage and rising food prices, Korea is already facing the deadly impacts of the climate crisis. Of course, things are only expected to worsen and accelerate over time,” said Park Jee-hye, a lawyer and director of Solutions for Our Climate.
In its 2020 yearbook published in June 2021, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) said, “The impact of climate change, which had been somewhat vague, has become more visible in recent years,” and “climate change will intensify causing unprecedented heat and cold waves, heavy snowfall and torrential rain.”
In a separate report, the KMA also noted “the frequency and severity of heat waves on the Korean Peninsula have shown a noticeable uptrend since the 1970s,” and “in recent cases of heat waves that have developed strongly on the Korean Peninsula, artificial effects from the increase in greenhouse gases were detected.”
As a consequence, flooding is anticipated to be one of the most common natural disasters on the Korean Peninsula brought on by climate change. Greenpeace estimates the number of people affected by flooding in the country will increase to 3.3 million in 2030.
“As our ecosystems change due to temperature increases, the agricultural and fishing industries will inevitably face more damage and adaptation costs,” Park said. “And as the habitat areas for pests and wildlife change, there is also an increased risk of infectious disease.”
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Impacts were also felt in the domestic fast food industry. In autumn last year, a number of fast food chains in Korea failed to serve lettuce in their hamburgers due to supply shortages.
According to fast food industry officials, Korean fast food chains import lettuce from China in summer, and then secure it from Gangwon Province in autumn _ mostly from October. However, an unusually early cold wave struck the province last year, resulting in local farms seeing their harvest fail thereby causing serious supply shortages.
Though the lettuce shortage was alleviated with supplies from other domestic provinces, the case highlighted the growing uncertainty in crop supplies, which will lead to an increase in vegetable prices.
Korean companies' inattention to climate change and belated efforts for decarbonization are also reasons why experts pick climate change as one of the risks the country must face.
“From a short-term perspective, it may seem that decarbonization is inconvenient and costly to industry,” Park said. “However, in the long run, deeper emissions cuts and faster energy transition will bring more economic benefits and global competitiveness. Companies in advanced economies such as Apple, Microsoft, and BMW were quick to realize this, and this is why they are much better positioned now. Samsung, on the other hand, faces a roadblock to going 100 percent renewable like Apple due to Korea's current power sector structure which prevents the direct sale of clean energy.”
Park added that Korea's next administration needs to strengthen the country's climate commitments, and without those changes, Korea and its industries will be left behind.
A customer pays cash at a cafe in Gurye County, South Jeolla Province, Oct. 25, as credit card readers went down nationwide due to a network disruption. Yonhap
3. Perils of a hyperconnected society
In October, Korea suffered a nationwide network outage following a simple routing error at KT, one of the largest internet service providers in Korea. The outage lasted for just 90 minutes, but disrupted credit card payments, online classes, stock trading programs and other internet-linked services, resulting in an estimated 1 trillion won in losses.
Other than direct financial damage, there were more fundamental problems such as people being locked up in offices and parking spaces and errors at medical and emergency response systems, raising attention on the risks of a hyperconnected society.
There was a similar network outage in 2018 when a fire at a KT branch in western Seoul caused network disruptions affecting parts of Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan area.
Back then, the government announced a number of preventive measures, including a “disaster roaming service” allowing users to connect to other telecom companies' networks in case of a network outage. This, however, did not work during last year's outage.
Experts said in the era of hyperconnectivity, an error in the central control system may cause temporary disruptions in a small coverage region, but it can trigger larger-scale disturbances across society.
“In a smart city, whose infrastructure is comprised of cutting-edge Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, there are greater risks of a small accident paralyzing key functions of the city,” Deloitte said in its 2019 report on smart cities.
“The higher the level of technology required for city infrastructure is, the greater the difficulty will be to restore it given the complexity of causes and damage. If there is a malfunction in smart technology-based infrastructure, it will be more difficult to restore it compared to that of conventional ones.”
Though the cases with KT were attributable to accidents, experts agree there are too many contingencies that can trigger large-scale network disruptions and subsequent disturbances, such as natural disasters, power outages and even cyberattacks.
“The disconnection of a network became the biggest risk of a hyperconnected society,” professor Kim Sung-wook at Seoul Women's University said in his 2020 paper titled “5G service and universal service.”
“We should make greater efforts to keep networks intact, and the efforts should start from recognizing 5G as infrastructure and a public good.”