In my last presentation I had just received some usable data—GIS shapefiles and relevant census information for the country of South Korea and was in the middle of translating and figuring out what I could do with my data.

My research questions were as follows:

• Where are the most heavily polluted areas in South Korea?
• Who are the most disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards esp. since the nation is virtually homogeneous?
• What are some of the demographics that characterize the regions that are most heavily polluted in Korea?

First of all, there were some major limitations of which 2 were most prominent:

1)  The Census Data are Inconsistent:

•     Although I was able to obtain some good shapefiles that had broken down the country into the smallest spatital units, the most of the census data I was able to find did not correspond with even the Shi_Gu level, which would be similar to the cities in the United States.  Some data such as the total population were present at the smallest (Dong_Li) level whereas others, such as income or employement data were only available at the largest, (prefecture/county) levels.

2) Environmental Data Very Limited:

• Since my research questions involved looking at areas in which there were clusters of environmental hazards and this then required me to obtain some pointfiles of where these such facilities are located in Korea
• Unfortunately, I found that the government did not release any specific data on environmental pollutants and especially any information on the actual location of these facilities was unavailable.
• The only actual data I was able to get along these lines, was the "Number of ‘Pollution Facilities’ (air, water pollution)" in each prefecture/region.

Once I had finished the grueling work of translating everything into english, coding and joining all of my data, I found my results to be rather disappointing.
With the data I had available to me, the only remotely interesting maps I was able to generate was by using the sketcy environmental data on
"Number of Pollution Facilities (air, water pollution)" and "Amount of Waste Generation (kg)."  I also tried to include aspects of those unemployed and the foreign population in my maps.  Even though the foreign popluation is an incredibly small minority in South Korea, I was still interested to see whether these folks were predominantly concentrated in one region or not.

But really...none of these results are at all that interesting.  One of the biggest issues is the fact that the region of study is just way too big to do any meaningful analysis. Although we can get some general ideas on what some of the general demographic characteristics are of a region (which probably can be compared to looking at population and housing data at the State level in the United States), that's just about where it all ends.

So that's about it for my semester project...

on SOUTH KOREA. 
                                        CLICK!!!!