Flood Inundation in the Nu stream & the Sudong reservoir of North Korea

Keywords: Land cover change, agricultural land use change, flood, remote sensing
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

In August and September 2020, North Korea was gravely affected by massive rainfall from three typhoons Bavi, Maysak, and Haishen within two weeks. It was the most rainfall between January and September in recent ten years. The North Korean government reported that around 40,000 hectares of croplands were damaged and 16,000 dwelling houses were dislocated. The flood damage in 2020 contributed to the worst food shortage of the recent ten years. Even after the severe damage from flooding, the Kim Jong Un regime stressed ‘self-reliance’ on people of North Korea and refused humanitarian aids from the South Korean government and the international community with the concern of the spread of COVID-19, causing more humanitarian crisis for its own people. The research objective of this study was to detect changes in land cover types due to floods in the Nu stream and the Sudong reservoir between 2019 and 2020. More attention was paid on agricultural and fallow agricultural lands. From the supervised classification, it can be concluded that the overflowing waterbodies covered surrounding arable lands in the Nu stream and the Sudong reservoir. Also, the floods damaged croplands, and crops were left unharvested in the fields as the harvest season was missed due to floods and workforce had to focus on restoring the flood damage. These results indicate that flooding worsened the crop shortage in North and South Hwanghae provinces, the breadbaskets of North Korea.