Hyundai Motor to restore forest ecosystem

Hyundai Motor Co. announced on Monday that it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a Sustainable Forest Ecosystem Restoration Project with the Korea Arboreta and Gardens Institute (KoAGI) and Tree Planet at Sejong National Arboretum. 

The collaboration aims to restore forest ecosystems and preserve biodiversity by rehabilitating damaged forests.

Hyundai Motor has partnered with KoAGI, an organization under the Korea Forest Service, and Tree Planet, a tree-planting social venture, to promote this initiative.

Over the next five years, Hyundai Motor will work with relevant organizations and companies to restore forests in the eastern coastal regions, which have suffered the most wildfire damage in the country, and create new eco-friendly forests.

The newly established forests will be part of the IONIQ Forest project, Hyundai Motor's flagship eco-friendly Creating Shared Value (CSV) activity, which has been running since 2016 with the participation of customers and local communities.

Hyundai Motor will use its eco-friendly mobility solution the IONIQ Drone Station for forest restoration and monitoring, and collaborate with the MOU partners on research for ecosystem restoration.

The IONIQ Drone Station is a special-purpose vehicle for forest management based on Hyundai's electric vehicle, the IONIQ 5.

It features a drone station in the trunk and a drone battery charging deck in the front trunk, utilizing Vehicle-to-Load (V2L) technology.

Hyundai Motor and its partners will employ drones to plant trees in hard-to-reach wildfire-damaged areas, conduct periodic monitoring of forest growth, collect data and engage in various research collaborations to enhance forest management.

Since 2014, Hyundai Motor's eco-friendly social contribution program, IONIQ Forest, has been creating forests to combat social issues of each era, starting with the creation of a forest to prevent fine dust at a landfill site in the Seoul metropolitan area.

By 2023, the global IONIQ Forest project has planted 500,000 trees in countries such as Brazil, India, the United States, Mexico and Canada, with a goal of planting 1 million trees worldwide by 2025.

Write to Jin-Won Kim at jin1@hankyung.com