This file photo shows the buildings of South Korea’s major companies in Seoul. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, March 22 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea companies with huge carbon emissions have formulated ambitious goals to achieve carbon neutral operations, but are having difficulty implementing such goals primarily due to high costs, a business lobby group said.
The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) conducted a survey of 346 local companies that participated in the carbon emission rights trading system. Of the total, 91.6 percent said that they had formulated their own carbon neutral goals.
Among them, 76.3 percent said that they aimed to achieve the goals by 2050, followed by 17.7 percent that aimed to reach the goals before 2050.
However, the share of companies that said they were taking concrete steps to achieve the goals remained low at 26.3 percent.
Among the remaining respondents, 47.4 percent said that they still didn’t have any concrete plans, while 26.3 percent simply said that plans would be underway at some point in the future.
In response to a question asking about the biggest challenge in implementing carbon neutral goals, more than one third of the of the respondents picked a shortage of investment capital, followed by a shortage of carbon reduction tools such as decarbonization technology at 26.9 percent, a shortage of renewable energy infrastructure at 15.3 percent, and policy uncertainty and absurd regulations at 14.2 percent.
J. S. Shin (js_shin@koreabizwire.com)
