Transcript:
Joonmo Kang, a researcher at the University of Kansas, recently spent a year living in Jjokbang-Chon, a poor neighborhood of Seoul, South Korea.
There, many people live in cramped apartments without kitchens, heat, or air conditioning.
Kang: “The conditions are extremely harsh. Many rooms are so small that some people have to sleep like diagonally just to lie down. And often there are no windows or ventilation, making the rooms dangerously hot in the summer and bitterly cold in winter.”
Kang moved to the neighborhood to study firsthand how climate change affects people in poverty.
He calculated that because residents there have few resources, they generate less than one-third as much climate-warming pollution as the average South Korean.
But their harsh living conditions put them in danger during extreme weather like heat waves.
Kang: “I think this also highlights the key injustice: Those who contribute least to climate change are often the ones living in the harshest conditions and with the fewest resources to adapt.”
Kang: “This experience profoundly changed me. It deepened my understanding of vulnerability, resilience, and injustice, not just as, like, an abstract concept, but as lived realities.”
Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media
