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| Electric vehicles are being driven by public workers of Yeonggwang County Government and local university students in a South Jeolla provincial county parade during the Yeonggwang e-Mobility Expo held in the county on Oct 14. Yeonggwang Mayor Kang Jong-man is in a small black farming truck at the head of the parade. Other participating vehicles were designed by the students. Courtesy of Yeonggwang County Government |
By Ko Dong-hwan
The government has intensified its environmental regulation obligations, forcing public entities and public institutions to replace their entire fleets, which currently use internal combustion engines, with emission-free vehicles.
The Ministry of Environment on Wednesday announced a set of regulatory measures under the country's Clean Air Conservation Act. One of the measures enforces all Cabinet ministries, municipal governments and state-run companies to equip themselves 100 percent with Class 1 Low-Emission vehicles ― which comprise electric, solar power and fuel-cell vehicles. State vehicles are either owned or leased by the government and public institutions.
The revision has ramped up the intensity of the country's vehicle management regulation in that the Class 1 vehicle requirement has so far called for just 80 percent of the nation's entire fleet of state-operated vehicles to satisfy the requirement. Conditions that have been in force so far also allowed the government and public institutions a broader range of options to choose from, such as Class 1 vehicles to hybrid models, under Class 2 and those running on internal combustion engines with controlled emission pollutants, which are under Class 3.
The Air Quality Policy Bureau and Climate Change and Carbon Neutral Policy Office under the ministry, which jointly pushed forward the latest measures, said that the new conditions will be promoted to public workers nationwide for the next 40 days starting Thursday, before officially kicking into practice.
The ministry has introduced the new requirement so that public workers can better apply the measures so as to reduce national carbon emissions and make the country's air cleaner.
"We wanted to have our public servants take the lead in improving air quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing or renting emission-free vehicles," said Park Yeon-jae, chief of the Air Quality Policy Bureau. "This will also be an opportunity for the ministry to carefully and rationally revise the law and thus reduce the incoherent gap between what our policies require and how they are practiced in reality."
The measures come after the country's automobile market and infrastructure have steadily grown in favor of emission-free vehicles. There were only eight electric car models available in the country in 2018 but the figure jumped to 55 in 2021 and is expected to reach 81 by the end of this year. As to battery rechargers for electric cars that are set up across the country, they numbered 27,352 in 2018 but expanded to over 106,000 in 2021 and over 160,000 as of October this year.
In the last year alone, the government and public institutions altogether purchased or rented 7,458 vehicles. Among them, low-emission vehicles accounted for 93 percent and emission-free vehicles 74 percent. The ministry said that following the latest measure, the number of emission-free vehicles operated by the country's public workers will increase greatly.
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