Meetings
Talks in Jeonju

For the second time, Hanns Seidel Foundation Korea together with Euraxess Korea organized a short trip of lectures and talks, this time to Jeonju, the capital of North Jeolla province.  In Jeonbuk National University, Prof. Jiyoun Park of the School of International Studies received Prof. Tomasz Wierzbowski of Euraxess, the European agency for scientific cooperation between Europe and the world, as well as Dr. Bernhard Seliger und Dr. Hyun-Ah Choi from HSF Korea. Discussions and presentations on mutual scientific and academic cooperation followed.

At the Jeonbuk Institute, a regional planning institute in Jeolla-Bukdo, the group met with Director Lee Kang-Jin as well as Dr Kim Bo Guk, Director of the Saemangeum Research Center. Saemangeum, the largest reclamation area in Korea, over decades has seen a changing fate, from being a huge tidal flat area, to being a newly reclaimed area with an uncertain future today. The reconciliation of economic development and ecological preservation or even renaturation is difficult in all of Korea, and the balance between both is also searched for in Saemangeum. In this sense, it is prototypical for the development in all of Korea. Dr. Bernhard Seliger showed how in the Wadden Sea, a huge European tidal flat area in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands in the last decades a working system of cross-border cooperation for nature preservation developed. Today, the Yellow Sea area also sees the first attempts for closer cooperation in preserving the unique ecosystem of the Yellow Sea tidal flats.

Together with Park Jeong-Seok and his team at the Jeonbuk Ecotourism Center, discussions also centered on ways to develop eco-tourism and preserve the nature for the future generation of citizens of Jeolla-Bukdo, but also all of Korea and the world. May 22 is the International Day of Biodiversity. Protecting biodiversity is not only a luxury issue for rich countries, but also means protecting the livelihood of people, preventing disasters and preparing for climate change. This task is a worldwide task, but it has to be tackled locally, like in Jeolla-Bukdo. Further cooperation of HSF Korea with the citizens and institutions of Jeolla-Bukdo will strengthen this task and the relation of the local, national and international level. European-Korean cooperation in science, and furthermore in policy formulation, will be necessary to overcome the challenges for preservation of biodiversity.