Gangneung: A nation accustomed to typhoons and floods has now declared a natural disaster over something rarer: drought. On Saturday, President Lee Jae Myung designated Gangneung, Gangwon Province, a disaster zone after its main reservoir fell below the threshold needed to sustain household supply – the first time in South Korea that drought alone has triggered such a measure. If typhoons and floods once defined the nation’s natural perils, today scarcity is the more menacing force.
According to Yonhap News Agency, Gangneung’s plight is stark. The Obong Reservoir, which supplies nearly 90 percent of the city’s water, is at 14.5 percent of capacity, barely one-fifth of the seasonal norm. In a month, its volume has halved. More than 53,000 households face rationing, with meters locked at three-quarters flow. Agriculture has been cut off entirely, restaurants and guesthouses have shortened hours, and hotels have shuttered pools and saunas. Fire trucks dispatched from across the country haul water into the city, yet the effort resembles trying to refill the sea with buckets. And the skies offer no relief.
This is not the slow-moving drought of old. Meteorologists describe Gangneung’s condition as a “flash drought” in which prolonged heat draws moisture from soil and air like a sponge, leaving crops and streams parched within weeks. Rainfall this year is just 41 percent of the norm, while temperatures are on track to make 2025 the hottest summer since records began in 1973. These extremes are no longer outliers. Seoul’s torrential flood in 2022, the southwestern drought of 2023 and the heavy central snowfalls of 2024 each signaled how climate volatility is reshaping risk. Gangneung is only the latest casualty.
The disaster also exposes policy failures closer to home. The city endured shortages in 2017 and again in 2024, yet still relied almost exclusively on a single reservoir. Experts had long warned that combining agricultural and household demand in one basin was reckless, but little was done. By contrast, neighboring Sokcho, once equally vulnerable, completed an underground dam in 2021 that now secures months of supply. As Gangneung rations, Sokcho hosts water festivals – an uncomfortable reminder that foresight, not geography, often decides who suffers.
The economic consequences of such neglect are not trivial. Studies by the Bank of Korea show climate shocks shave growth and lift inflation, as extreme rain and heat have pushed food prices up and delayed construction work. A prolonged drought like Gangneung’s, research suggests, could leave the nation short of hundreds of millions of tons of water and impose damages worth trillions of won. These are not temporary inconveniences but systemic costs that undermine competitiveness.
The government’s mobilization is commendable in speed, if not sufficiency. Over 100 vehicles have been dispatched, millions of water bottles stockpiled, and a national response team has been established. Yet bottled water and fire hoses cannot substitute for infrastructure. The planned Yeongokcheon underground dam remains unbuilt, and proposals for desalination plants or inter-basin transfers languish.
President Lee rightly criticized the inaction, but what’s needed now is not blame but investment that makes future droughts survivable without emergency declarations. The painful lesson of Gangneung is that climate adaptation is no longer optional. South Korea has spent decades designing cities, farms and industries around the weather of the past. That weather pattern is shifting at a threatening pace.
To cope with new types of disasters such as severe drought, water security must move to the top of the national agenda, alongside energy and technology. The government must diversify sources, modernize irrigation and build smarter management systems. Disaster declarations may calm public anxiety for now, but they do not refill reservoirs. Unless policy catches up with climate, the Gangneung drought will not be remembered as a rare aberration, but as an ominous preview.