In 2025, residents of Ongjin County in North Korea described ‘frequent fights’ between villagers collecting firewood and rangers tasked with protecting forests. As one witness observed, ‘People have no choice but to harm forests to survive, while rangers must intensify crackdowns to keep their jobs.’

Since 2021, North Korea has scored between 1.00 and 3.00 for flora crimes in the Global Organized Crime Index – below South Korea’s 3.50–4.00 range and far below China’s score of 8.50. These relatively low figures reflect limited evidence of an organized, profit-driven illegal flora market, consistent with formal state ownership of forests, increasing regulation, and little sign of autonomous logging syndicates or timber trafficking networks.

But a low score for flora crimes should not be interpreted as an indication of the absence of illegal forest use, nor as confirmation that North Korea’s forests are effectively protected. To understand the situation on the ground, the score must be read alongside North Korea’s resilience indicators, particularly its scores for ‘national policies and laws’ and ‘prevention’. Together, these factors describe a state that has built strong formal mechanisms to define and regulate forest access, but has not removed the conditions that make informal forest use necessary.

The roots of this complexity lie in the Arduous March, a devastating famine that swept through North Korea in the 1990s, when state collapse pushed citizens to rely on forests for fuel, food and land. Unregulated logging and hillside cultivation accelerated erosion, landslides and flooding, damaging agriculture and reinforcing household dependence on forest resources. Between 1999 and 2008, North Korea’s degraded forest area increased by an estimated 1.2 million hectares.

Despite this vast degradation, what persists today is not a conventional organized illicit timber trade but something more diffuse and fragmented, a form of illegality structured by the interaction between scarcity, state control and informal practices: the everyday arrangements through which households navigate restrictions, fulfil obligations and gain access to forest resources.

Rebuilding control

Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea has developed a much stronger formal architecture for forest governance. The National Forest Construction plan (2015–2044) framed reforestation as a national mobilization campaign requiring discipline, labour coordination and ideological urgency. The Chisan-Chisu plan (2021–2030) outlined land management, flood prevention and disaster-risk reduction. This repositioned forest restoration as a core national governance issue embedded within a broader state agenda, rather than a legacy of crisis-era survival strategies.

Legal codification has reinforced this distinction. Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s Forest Law has been revised and expanded to include provisions regulating the supply, sale and use of timber, as well as linking forest governance to local economic development. Provisions on economic forests – those earmarked for supplying raw materials for county industries and development – assign specific duties to institutions, enterprises and local people’s committees. This reflects a broader shift towards centrally directed, yet locally managed, forest governance that integrates resources into regional development while retaining state ownership and oversight. These measures aim to translate forest ownership into legal categories, administrative responsibilities and allocation mechanisms.

Although these reforms have expanded the state’s legal and administrative capacity to regulate forest use, they have not substantially increased resilience. Underlying structural issues remain unaddressed. This is evident from North Korea’s consistently low score of 2.0 out of 10 for the ‘national policies and laws’ indicator since 2021.

Alongside legal and policy changes, North Korea has introduced preventative measures, including reforestation, agroforestry, erosion control and designated fuelwood forests. Yet these initiatives mainly address ecological degradation rather than replacing the resources that forests provide. Recent reports of residents cutting down trees for winter fuel, despite intensified restrictions against it, show that dependence on forests has not disappeared.

Kim Jong Un-era economic changes have compounded this pressure. The field responsibility system links household livelihoods more closely to access to productive land, while the expansion of market activity has increased the value of timber, firewood and wild plants, both as tradable goods for generating informal income and as resources for meeting various obligations within workplaces and local institutions.

North Korea’s formal improvements remain incomplete without substitution. While preventative measures strengthen forest protection and regulation, they do not replace the energy, land and livelihood functions that forests continue to provide. This helps explain why the country’s ‘prevention’ resilience indicator has remained at 1.0 out of 10 since 2021.

Structured through governance

Because forest policies restrict access without providing adequate alternatives, illegality is simply displaced and absorbed into everyday systems of state control. This is what makes the North Korean case analytically distinctive. Here, illegal forest use is neither a conventional organized timber market nor individual misconduct.

Instead, it relies on a dense infrastructure of local governments, institutions, workplaces, working units, inminban neighbourhood organizations, forest rangers and residents. It is through these actors that forest rules enter everyday life – organizing labour for reforestation campaigns, enforcing access restrictions, monitoring compliance and relaying centrally issued directives at the local level.

The actors tasked with implementing these policies are also subject to their constraints. Residents are expected to comply with forest restrictions and contribute labour to reforestation and local development, while they continue to depend on forests for fuel, forest products and informal income.

This tension is managed, in practice, through informal arrangements. Bribery, in-kind exchange or labour substitution can help residents avoid penalties, access restricted resources or manage obligations that exceed local capacity. At the same time, those responsible for enforcement may be drawn into these exchanges as they navigate the pressure to meet restoration and development targets or show compliance. Stronger governance, therefore, does not simply suppress illegality; it structures the conditions under which forest access, compliance and evasion are negotiated.

North Korea’s expansion of forest governance should not be dismissed as merely cosmetic. While technical restoration, stronger enforcement and improved monitoring can strengthen formal capacity, they cannot by themselves address the conditions that perpetuate informal forest use. This has implications for how external engagement with North Korea is framed. If forestry remains one of the least politically sensitive entry points for cooperation, future programmes will need to look beyond restoration targets and enforcement capacity to consider the energy, livelihood and local institutional pressures that make regulating forest access so difficult in practice.