Whoops and cheers for South Korea filled a side room first thing on Monday morning at the COP30 climate conference, as environment minister Kim Sung-Hwan announced the country’s commitment to phasing out coal.
Together with Bahrain, South Korea formally joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance at the start of the conference’s second week. They join more than 180 national and subnational governments, businesses and organisations working to transition from unabated coal generation to clean energy.
This is the first time that the South Korean government, which operates the world’s seventh largest coal fleet, has made an official commitment to stop building new unabated coal plants and to phase out existing ones. Solar and wind power make up less than 10 per cent of the country’s energy mix, with coal, nuclear, oil and gas making up the rest of the country’s power supply.
Out of the country’s 61 existing coal-fired power plants, 40 are already scheduled to be phased out by 2040, said Kim in a speech on Monday at COP30.
“The phase out date for the remaining 21 coal plants will be determined based on economic and environmental feasibility after public discussion, and a specific plan is scheduled to be established next year,” he said.
South Korea is “determined to foster renewable energy industries including wind, solar, battery energy storage systems (BESS) and [the electricity] grid,” he told reporters after the speech.
South Korea environment minister Kim Sung-hwan spoke to the press at the COP30 climate conference. Image: Samantha Ho/ Eco-Business
Kim, who was appointed to lead the environment ministry in October, also said that the government wants to help Korean companies retain their competitive advantage in manufacturing. When the country’s new 2035 target to halve emissions from 2018 levels was announced last week, industry associations for the petroleum, steel and cement sectors cried foul.
But policies are being developed for a new and more efficient power mix, said Kim. “Our long term goal is to create a decarbonised green society where renewable energy takes up a large share in our power mix, using nuclear as a complementary [power] source and gas as an emergency source [of energy].”
The country has already pledged up to US$20 million in low interest loans for projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
South Korean climate advocates welcomed the government’s pledge, calling for as much ambition in phasing out oil and gas projects in the country.
“Public finance from (South Korea) still ranks among the world’s second-largest source of fossil fuel funding,” said Seokhwan Jeong, who leads the Korean team investigating gas at the non-profit Solutions for Our Climate. The organisation’s latest report found that the country channels approximately US$10 billion per year towards financing fossil fuels.
South Korea’s transition to clean energy, however, could double jobs and add more than US$7 trillion in economic value by 2035, the report added.
Countries, NGOs and monetary experts unite
Cambodia also joined the list of countries committing on Monday to accelerate clean energy use as it became the eighteenth country to sign the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a global plan to end the use of dirty energy sources aligned with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5ºC.
Calls for the transition away from fossil fuels have gained traction at COP30, though not an official part of negotiators’ agendas. Early on in the conference, Colombia proposed a declaration to support the transition – the country is one of the first oil-producing nations to have joined the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and will be hosting the world’s first conference on the subject in April next year.
This was also in spite of a record number of industry lobbyists recorded at this year’s climate summit, according to the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition. Among the offenders was Indonesia, which had been singled out by non-profit coalition Climate Action Network for reportedly using talking points from these lobbyists in a negotiation about global carbon credit trading rules.
The lack of transition finance has been the main stumbling block to cleaning up Indonesia’s coal-dependent energy sector, said Paul Butarbutar, head of the Just Energy Transition Partnership Secretariat.
In a crowded COP30 event about the transition away from fossil fuels on Friday, Butarbutar said that although the government has planned to retire around 6.7 gigawatts of coal-fired power plant capacity, it has struggled to secure financing for any of it.
Indonesia is a co-chair of the Coal Transition Commission alongside France, which has been working to identify coal-fired power plants for early retirement. But French special envoy for climate Benoît Faraco said his country has also struggled to shutter its coal-fired power plants, despite having conversations with coal workers over the past seven years.
At the same event, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that fossil fuel subsidies, which total roughly US$7.6 trillion worldwide or nearly 7 per cent of the global economy, are “extremely regressive” and inefficient.
“Fossil fuel subsidies continue to be underpriced, overused and funding inequality,” said the IMF’s deputy chief of climate policy Diego Mesa. If reformed, the repricing of dirty fuels can raise more than enough money to protect rural households from climate impacts, he said.
Representatives from civil society groups call for an end to fossil fuel financing by South Korea at a protest organised by Solutions for Our Climate on the sidelines of the COP30 climate conference. Image: Samantha Ho/Eco-Business
This story was produced as part of the 2025 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.
