[Asia Economy Reporter Joo Sang-don] The Ministry of Environment and the Korea Environment Corporation are accepting applications for about six weeks from the 2nd to the 10th of next month to discover carbon-neutral models in the public sector, aiming to realize leading carbon neutrality in the public sector.
The public sector carbon-neutral model discovery project is being promoted to select representative facility types considering the purpose, aging, and greenhouse gas emission characteristics of buildings or facilities, and to discover and spread optimized carbon-neutral models.
The application targets are buildings or environmental infrastructure facilities owned by local governments that have been completed for more than 10 years but less than 30 years. The final selection will be one site per five types, totaling five sites.
The Ministry of Environment will select three times the number of candidates in order of high scores through the first document screening, then form a review committee for the second round to finalize the target sites through written and on-site evaluations.
For the selected project sites, feasibility studies and basic plans for carbon neutrality of representative types of buildings or facilities will be prepared by 2021, and design and construction will be promoted over two years from 2022 to 2023. To this end, a total of 8 billion KRW (4 billion KRW annually) per site will be fully supported by the national treasury.
The selected project sites must maintain the carbon neutrality goals of the facilities presented in the basic plans in consultation with the Ministry of Environment after completion. Also, buildings subject to zero-energy building certification must obtain at least a grade 3 certification of zero-energy buildings and report the carbon-neutral operation results to the Ministry of Environment for three years.
Local governments wishing to participate in the public sector carbon-neutral model discovery project can submit application forms and project plans to the Korea Environment Corporation during the application period.
Lee Byung-hwa, Director of Climate Change Policy at the Ministry of Environment, said, "As local governments are very interested in carbon neutrality, we hope they will participate in this contest by applying various carbon-neutral measures suitable for the characteristics of buildings," adding, "Through this project, we will discover exemplary cases of carbon neutrality in public buildings and lay the foundation for spreading them to the private sector."
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