While many analysts and policymakers are focused on Pyongyang’s nuclear development program, an unlikely environmentalist initiative has taken place in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea — “a war to improve nature.”

In the last six years, the North Korean government has focused on combating deforestation in its mountainous terrain with some success. It has advocated creating a landscape of “treasure and gold mountains” covered in thickly wooded forests within the next decade. 

This ecological campaign, along with photographic and satellite evidence, suggests that North Korea’s mountainous landscape is currently in a fairly dire situation.

But the leadership-driven project has yielded