Borim Kim

Fossil Fuels, Fossil Fuels

With a highly urbanized population of 51 million people, South Korea is the 13th largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and among the highest emitters per capita. The country is heavily reliant on imported coal and natural gas for its energy grid—importing more than 90% of its supply—with coal and natural gas generating more than 57% of its electricity. Tied to its domestic coal consumption, South Korea has also invested heavily in overseas coal extraction to ensure access to coal imports.

Despite introducing its first voluntary emissions reduction targets in 2009 and ratifying the Paris Agreement in 2016, South Korea’s renewable energy generation remains limited, with a renewable electricity generation rate of 9% in 2023 (against a global average of 30%).

Additionally, the country has significant climate change vulnerabilities that have made headlines in recent years. An infamous heatwave in 2018 killed 48 people, caused 4,500 heat-related illnesses, and led to the deaths of an estimated 3.2 million livestock. In July 2025, major flooding killed at least 18, part of a trend of increasingly common monsoon events. Average temperatures in South Korea increased by 0.60°C (1.08°F) between 2000 and 2020, and average annual rainfall could—at the current rate—increase more than six inches annually by 2070.

Compelled into Action

Borim Kim, 31, has lived all of her life in Seoul, a megacity with nearly 10 million inhabitants and 26 million in its metropolitan area. Climate change and environmental issues have long been a focus for her, and for many years she believed that these challenges could be addressed through individual choices and everyday practices: living a zero-waste life, a vegetarian diet, and connecting with others who cared about environmental issues.

That understanding shifted decisively during the record-breaking heatwave that swept through Seoul in the summer of 2018. As extreme temperatures persisted, authorities advised residents to simply stay indoors. Yet Borim felt, for the first time, that the home itself was not necessarily a safe place. Many homes in her dense neighborhood—including her own—lacked air conditioning and were poorly equipped to withstand extreme heat. When news broke that a local woman around her mother’s age had died from heat-related illness inside her own home, Borim confronted a new reality: in a climate crisis, the very space meant to provide safety could become a site of danger.

This realization became more concrete as Borim paid closer attention to the conditions surrounding her family and community. Workplaces that could not pause during heatwaves or cold snaps, housing conditions that were steadily deteriorating, and everyday lives in which neither preparation for disaster nor recovery was realistic. Risk, she observed, was not something individuals could simply avoid through better choices. As climate impacts intensified, the burden of risk was pushed almost entirely onto individuals—and the fewer resources someone had, the more climate hazards became threats to survival.

For Borim, the climate crisis ceased to be an abstraction and became a question of how society defines its baseline for life itself: who is able to prepare and recover in the face of disaster, and whose lives are considered worthy of protection.

Meeting other young people who shared this sense of urgency, Borim started to get involved. While the global youth climate movement offered inspiration, she felt that raising voices alone was not enough. As such, Borim founded Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) and began organizing climate strikes and school walkouts. She and Y4CA coordinated small-scale protests, letter-writing campaigns, and requests for meetings with policymakers. These efforts played a key role in elevating climate change into a major social issue in South Korea and helped mobilize thousands of citizens into climate action.

Yet, through this process, Borim confronted clear limitations. Elected officials with real decision-making power over the climate crisis often chose not to change underlying structures. Instead, young people and future generations were frequently invoked as symbols—praised and encouraged publicly—without meaningful action.

A Legal Strategy Emerges

Gradually, Borim learned that asking or demanding change from policymakers—even through visible protest—ultimately relied on the voluntary will of those in power. She concluded that confronting the climate crisis required a way to directly hold the state accountable. She decided that a judicial strategy was the best way forward—not as a symbolic gesture, but as a means to compel structural change.

Many doubted that a climate lawsuit was realistic in South Korea, or argued that youth plaintiffs would not be recognized as legitimate parties. Despite these doubts, Borim and her colleagues sought out lawyers who were willing to test the limits of constitutional law. Together, they examined the country’s climate policies and emissions targets, documenting how prolonged inaction and weak commitments failed to protect fundamental rights. These gaps became the evidentiary foundation of their case.

Y4CA reframed the climate crisis not as a failure of environmental policy, but as a systemic violation of the rights to life, safety, and dignity of future generations. In March 2020, 19 youth plaintiffs—organized by Borim and Y4CA—filed a climate-related constitutional complaint against the South Korean government, the first of its kind in Asia.

International precedent strengthened their resolve. A landmark Dutch climate ruling—led by Marjan Minnesma, winner of the 2022 Goldman Prize—demonstrated that courts could hold governments accountable for climate inaction.

Y4CA invested significant effort into making climate advocacy accessible to young people and communicating the issue in ways that resonated broadly. It organized legislative campaigns, including mass letter actions to the National Assembly, while coordinating public actions demanding a coal phase-out and a transition away from fossil fuels. It also staged artistic performances to expose government and corporate greenwashing and actively amplify its message. These efforts yielded some tangible outcomes: South Korea announced an end to new overseas coal investments; 14 of 17 provincial education offices adopted coal phase-out policies in public finance; and a major automaker withdrew plans for a new LNG power facility. In October 2020, the president pledged net-zero emissions by 2050—though without legally binding reduction targets.

As the campaign continued, climate change increasingly came to be understood within South Korea as a human rights issue. In 2022, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea formally affirmed that the climate crisis constitutes a human rights issue and submitted an opinion to the Constitutional Court, stating that the youth climate lawsuit was well-founded and that the state’s climate targets were insufficient to protect fundamental rights.

Building on Y4CA’s constitutional complaint, additional climate lawsuits followed—including one from civil society organizations and citizens in 2021 and, later, one from infants represented by their caregivers in what became known as the “Baby Climate Litigation.”

As the lawsuits slowly progressed, Borim sought to cast the complaint not just as a legal milestone but as a social movement. She developed messaging to show how people experience the climate crisis in their own lives. By lowering barriers to participation and enabling people to engage in their own language, Y4CA submitted a “People’s Participation Brief” to the Constitutional Court, compiling the words and testimonies of 5,200 individuals.

A Critical Ruling

In August 2024, the South Korean Constitutional Court sided with Borim and the 254 other plaintiffs, declaring the government’s climate policy unconstitutional for failing to safeguard the right to safety amid the climate crisis. The court mandated that the South Korean legislature develop emissions reductions targets for 2031-2049 in line with international standards and climate science, with a February 2026 deadline. An analysis by the South Korean think tank NEXT Group estimated that the decision will prevent between 1,600 and 2,100 million tons of CO₂ emissions. Following the ruling, the ministry of the environment immediately accepted the decision, stating that it will follow the court’s directive.

The decision did more than acknowledge the need for stronger emissions targets. It established a new baseline for climate governance in South Korea, asserting that the state’s duty in responding to the climate crisis must be guided by the right of its people to live safely.

The ruling’s impact has reverberated across Asia, inspiring youth-led climate lawsuits in Japan and Taiwan in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Y4CA has supported these efforts and shared knowledge with young climate activists throughout Asia.

For Borim, the legal victory is the minimum standard for a government to uphold—and still a work in progress. Ensuring that no one’s life is expendable in a warming world—and holding the state accountable—remains at the core of her work today as climate litigation and movement-building continue.