South Korea’s top businesses such as POSCO and Samsung Electronics Co. will have to significantly cut their greenhouse gas emissions output in 2012 to help stem global climate change, the government said Monday.

The Ministry of Knowledge Economy said leading steelmaker POSCO needs to cut emission levels by 963,000 CO2 equivalent tons next year, compared with business-as-usual or when no reduction measures are taken.

Seoul pledged in late 2009 to unilaterally reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the country by 30 percent of its BAU by 2020, with the corporate sector responsible for making the most cuts.

In 2012, 458 companies, which release an average of 125,000 CO2-eqt of greenhouse gases per year, will be required to reduce emissions by a combined 8.72 million CO2-eqt, a cut of 1.44 percent from the BAU. These companies will be permitted to release 598.0 million tons of greenhouse gases next year.

Of the total, POSCO’s target represents 20.6 percent of cuts that need to be made for the entire industrial sector. Cuts that need to be made by Samsung, the world’s largest memory chipmaker, stood at 429,000 CO2-eqt.

“In addition to POSCO and Samsung, eight other energy-intensive conglomerates make up 54.1 percent of the 47 million BAU CO2-eqt cuts that need to be made by South Korean businesses in the cited year,” the ministry said.

The ministry in charge of the country’s industrial and energy policies said that overall, large conglomerates are responsible for 97.9 percent of all emission cuts in the industrial sector, with small and medium-size enterprises responsible for the rest.

In addition to BAU reductions that need to be made in the industrial sector, the country’s power generation sector must cut greenhouse gas output by 3.6 million CO2-eqt next year.

The ministry said that companies tasked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2012 must submit detailed action plans by December and report on the results made during the one year period before the end of March 2013.

Failure to meet the target can result in an order to make improvements and possible fines, it said.

Samsung Electronics and POSCO said that they will push for more recycling of spent energy, incorporate more fuel efficient production systems and set up a greenhouse gas inventory to better track emission levels. Both companies said that every effort will be made to meet reduction targets.

Others in the business community, however, expressed concerns that Seoul is pushing forward a policy that is not being pursued by advanced industrialized economies such as the United States. They said such steps could become a burden on businesses facing a slowdown in global growth. 

(Yonhap News)