Environmental self-reliance in North Korea: a potential path to engagement

Many of North Korea’s most pressing challenges don’t stem from military brinkmanship, but from a deepening environmental crisis. Because of its reliance on domestic natural resources, North Korea faces deforestation, a lack of arable land, and extreme flooding.

Kim Jong-un has been surprisingly transparent about these issues. He has attributed flooding to deforestation caused by firewood collection and crop expansion. He has called food scarcity a “serious political issue” and dedicated 43 percent of his 2021 party speech to agricultural topics.

North Korea’s isolation prevents it from acquiring the technical capacity to effectively address these issues. The United States and its allies could help North Korea fundamentally solve its environmental problems in exchange for face-saving military concessions that align with Kim Jong-un’s ideology of self-reliance. North Korea has previously been unwilling to scale back military programs in exchange for other types of Western assistance, and relations between Kim and US President Donald Trump have cooled. Nevertheless, constructive engagement with the hermit kingdom on environmental issues is an approach that deserves consideration.

Negotiating an agreement on Ukraine. One avenue for engagement could involve a European initiative to reduce North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The European Union could help North Korea create “co-located farms,” which pair energy-generating devices—for example, a canopy of solar panels in a staggered layout—with irrigated farms to produce the optimal balance between light, shade, and watering.

Co-located farms can substantially increase both food and energy production, and can be developed without arable farmland. For example, co-located greenhouses in Hainan, China, are capable of supplying vegetables to approximately 30 percent of the province’s population per year and can generate 2 gigawatts of electricity. The European Union could provide the equipment and training needed to generate the electricity produced by co-located farms and to route it to households through decentralized networks, circumventing North Korea’s failing power grid.

If the European Union provided this assistance, it could offer Kim a long-term solution to deforestation in North Korea. Deforestation weakens the regime’s ability to provide food by eroding soil and increasing the vulnerability of crops to flooding—leading to starvation, price hikes, and burglaries by hungry soldiers. North Korea’s inability to produce enough food also creates a dependence on food imports, making the country’s food supply vulnerable to disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. If Europe offered assistance with building co-located farms, Kim might be incentivized to choose long-term improvements in food and energy security over the benefits of military cooperation with Russia.

In the Ukraine conflict, North Korean troops have suffered approximately 4,700 casualties. The conditions for North Korea’s troops to gain combat experience are substandard because of language barriers and differences in terrain between Ukraine and East Asia. Russia’s main export to North Korea since the beginning of the war in Ukraine has been raw food materials, but this assistance is unlikely to alleviate food insecurity and offers no long-term solutions to the North’s agricultural problems. Thus, Kim is seeing weak returns on his allocation of troops to Russia after North Korea’s population was “on the brink of famine” in 2023.

Russia’s underperformance in Ukraine could lead Kim to view environmental infrastructure assistance as a more stable benefit to regime security than Russian military assistance. Hence, the European Union could offer to help North Korea create co-located farms and solar grids in exchange for an incremental withdrawal of North Korean troops from the conflict in Ukraine. If North Korea complied, South Korea could reduce arms shipments to Ukraine to mitigate Russian opposition to the deal. This gradual approach avoids asking North Korea to undertake a sudden, major realignment away from military relations with Russia, although it is unclear whether any pivot away from Russia would currently be too much to ask of Kim.

Flood prevention as a basis for arms control. Another proposal could enable Japan, South Korea, and the United States to halt significant enhancements to North Korea’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. Japan could invite delegations from North Korea to obtain the technical expertise to build anti-flooding infrastructure through Japan’s development center at the World Bank. Japan, South Korea, and the United States could collectively provide enough votes to establish a Trust Fund for North Korea to finance development.

This would motivate North Korea by funding flood preparation through a neutral third-party platform, rather than relying exclusively on donations from adversaries. It would also enable the United States to expand the fund beyond regional alliances to increase burden sharing.

In exchange, North Korea would agree to halt its development of decoy re-entry vehicles for ballistic missiles. These vehicles accompany lethal payloads in a missile strike to overwhelm an opponent’s air defenses, increasing the chances of a lethal payload making it through. If North Korea ceased its development of decoy re-entry vehicles, the United States, South Korea, and Japan would prevent a significant reduction in the performance of their air defenses. At the same time, Kim would avoid the appearance of weakness by only stopping the development of nonlethal vehicles.

This agreement could also appeal to both sides by reducing nuclear risk. In 2013, a river that provides cooling water for North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor flooded, clogging pipes with sand and diverting water away from the cooling system. This prompted a shutdown to avoid overheating and the release of radioactive material. If the reactor had remained online, a similar flooding incident in 2020 would have required another shutdown. North Korea restored the reactor in 2021, and the cooling system may still be vulnerable to flooding.

Similarly, flooding has routinely washed away bridges and access roads to command and control centers at North Korea’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site. In 2023, the Transnational Justice Working Group reported that leakages of radioactive material at Punggye-ri had spread through the site’s groundwater.

Nuclear weapons researcher Matt Korda has noted that “Pyongyang’s ability to respond to a nuclear accident in a timely fashion will make the difference between a small-scale event and a catastrophic disaster.” Consequently, the stand-alone benefits of improving nuclear safety at sites such as Yongbyon and Punggye-ri can justify flood prevention assistance for North Korea.

Some may argue that Kim is unwilling to entertain diplomacy, given his increasing hostility toward the outside world. In 2024, Kim stated that tensions with the United States and South Korea had entered their “worst phase in history” and called for North Koreans to prepare for war. Last year, North Korea also tested its first “nuclear trigger” command and control system, which allows Kim to quickly swap conventional armed shells for nuclear armed ones in his rocket launchers.

However, with food insecurity at disastrous levels alongside chronic flooding and heavy rain, Kim may be ramping up his military leverage against the outside world because he has little capacity to manage domestic crises. North Korea’s environmental instability is also driven by climate change—the North ranks among the 11 countries most vulnerable to climate change, with projections forecasting dramatic rises in surrounding sea levels and crop failures in the coming decades. Similar environmental and military trends preceded Kim’s engagement with President Donald Trump in 2019. Therefore, Kim may seriously consider diplomacy despite recent military escalations.

A path toward long-term engagement. Providing fundamental solutions to North Korea’s environmental problems could create a pathway for sustained engagement. Traditional disaster aid has been reactive and superficial, leading Kim to make decisions about engagement based on short-term geopolitics rather than fundamental domestic needs. For example, after North Korea’s 2024 flooding disaster, South Korea offered relief supplies, and Russian President Vladimir Putin offered “immediate humanitarian support” to aid recovery efforts. According to North Korea’s state-run news agency, Kim rejected both offers but stated “if aid is necessary in the course, he would ask for it from the truest friends in Moscow.” The current aid dynamic also enables Kim to frame assistance from US alliances as violating North Korea’s ideology of self-reliance, while framing Russian aid as supporting the independence of both states from a Western-dominated global system.

By enabling North Korea to construct environmental infrastructure itself, US alliances could largely adhere to North Korea’s state ideology of self-reliance. Still, the gradual nature of this assistance would create long-term incentives for the regime to improve its reputation among donor states, such as increasing human rights protections to solicit further development. This approach could provide an on-ramp to negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

None of this is to say that convincing Kim Jong-un to make these tradeoffs, even with an emphasis on North Korean self-reliance, would be easy. Previous proposals to exchange Western economic or medical assistance for military concessions have been rejected, and North Korea’s alignment with Russia is a pillar of its strategic doctrine.

Aligning Western leaders around this strategy would also be challenging. Trump is uninterested in addressing issues related to climate change. Furthermore, given North Korea’s recent buildup of short-range ballistic missiles and purported development of a tactical nuclear warhead, leaders in South Korea and Japan may feel pressure to prioritize military responses to North Korea.

Without direct access to North Korea, it is unclear whether the country’s environmental problems are primarily caused by climate change, a lack of infrastructure, or poor resource management. Multiple factors are likely responsible, which creates opportunities for Trump and EU leaders to focus on their respective priorities.

Trump could play the role of a broker and investor focusing on resource management and infrastructure development, arranging talks with Kim over these aspects of the proposal and managing its financing. In his first term, Trump showed interest in developing beachside condos in North Korea as a way of opening the country up to investment from the outside world. Trump may also be willing to accept sustainable development solutions if they are necessary for logistical reasons. For example, since North Korea lacks a functioning central power grid, solar power is probably the most realistic way to address energy insecurity on a large scale.

EU leaders, for their part, could be motivated to pursue the proposal based on their interest in mitigating climate change. Leaders in South Korea and Japan could benefit from de-escalation facilitated by the United States and long-term stability supported by the EU, which might outweigh the benefits of military responses to North Korea.

A diplomatic focus on environmental self-reliance in North Korea offers the chance to align a complex array of state interests toward productive cooperation. If successful, this strategy may offer a roadmap for using environmental diplomacy to solve global security problems.