Disaster Recovery Costs and Victim Support Reduced... Approximately 120 Million KRW Social Cost Savings per Single Dispatch
[Asia Economy Reporter Eunmo Koo] SK Telecom announced on the 27th that it is estimated to create approximately 500 billion KRW of social value annually through its disaster alert message service.
This study was conducted as part of a government project to analyze the social benefits of disaster alert messages, whose usage continues to increase, to understand the current status of the disaster alert message system and to derive future development directions. The research was primarily led by Professor Heonjae Song's team from the Department of Economics at the University of Seoul, with SK Telecom serving in an advisory role.
According to the research team's analysis of disaster alert messages related to natural disasters such as typhoons, earthquakes, and heatwaves from 2011 to 2019, the average annual number of messages sent was about 4,000. Each disaster alert message sent reduces social costs by approximately 120 million KRW on average. This effect was calculated based on the reduction in disaster recovery costs and displaced persons through the sending of disaster alert messages at the city, county, and district levels.
Including social disasters such as infectious diseases, which have significantly increased since last year, the effect of creating social value is expected to rise sharply. The occurrence of social disasters increased from 380,000 cases in 2011 to 480,000 cases in 2019.
SK Telecom is also working with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and the National Disaster Safety Research Institute to advance the emergency disaster alert message system. By utilizing location information from mobile communication networks, they are preparing a disaster alert message sending system that can narrow the sending range, which was previously set within a radius of several tens of kilometers, to a dense cell-based range of several hundred meters, corresponding to the operational range of wireless base station networks.
Recently, SK Telecom and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety successfully conducted a pilot project to refine the sending units from the existing city, county, and district levels to the town, township, and neighborhood levels in the Jeju and Changwon regions.
With the annual number of disaster alert messages rapidly increasing from 375 in 2016 to 860 in 2018 and 54,732 in 2020, this effort aims to reduce the inconvenience of some users receiving unnecessary disaster messages regardless of their location due to the wide sending area.
The research team plans to publish detailed study results on the social value created by disaster alert messages in October. Additionally, through follow-up research, they will analyze the social value of social disaster messages such as those for infectious diseases and fires, as well as the social benefits of refining the disaster alert message sending range.
Lee Sangheon, Head of Policy Development at SK Telecom, stated, "As part of ESG management, we are always striving to protect the safety of the public and society through ICT technology in collaboration with the government," adding, "We will further strengthen efforts to enhance social value through ICT infrastructure based on this analysis of the social value of disaster alert messages."
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