Students from the Global Climate Change, Innovative Monitoring & Modeling Lab (Advisor: Professor Lim Chul Hee) in the Department of Forestry, Environment, and Systems at Kookmin University won the Best Paper Award at the ‘2025 Academic Conference’ hosted by The Korean Society of Climate Change Research, achieving outstanding results.

At this conference, undergraduate and master's students identified urban climate risks exacerbated by climate change using artificial intelligence and spatial analysis techniques, presenting scientific policy grounds for realizing climate justice.

Park Ji Soo, a master's student in the Department of Climate Technology Convergence (advisor: Lim Chul Hee), won the Best Presentation Paper Award in the oral presentation session for the first half of the year with the topic “Cost and Effect Evaluation of Adaptation for Mitigating Climate Inequality and Flood Risk.” To identify the problem of flood damage disproportionately affecting semi-basement households, the elderly, and low-income groups, she developed a flood inequality index and verified the actual effectiveness of Seoul's adaptation policies using the difference-in-differences method. The study proved that combinations of drainage systems with support for vulnerable groups, and drainage systems with early warning systems, showed statistically significant damage reduction effects. It also demonstrated the investment value of a multi-faceted policy approach by projecting long-term benefits of climate adaptation policies through 2050.

Choi Hee Do (Class of 2021), a student in the Department of Forestry, Environment, and Systems (scheduled to enter the Graduate School's Climate Technology Convergence Department), received recognition for his research achievements by winning awards twice in one year. He won the Best Poster Paper Award in the first half of the year for his poster presentation titled “Urban Heat Island Risk Assessment Based on Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks.” In the second half, he was awarded in the Graduate Student Excellence Support Program for his work on “Climate Justice through Explainable Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Networks.” He developed a 500m high-resolution graph neural network model to assess Seoul's urban heat island risk and demonstrated its correlation with actual heat-related illness cases. Crucially, his discovery that the dominant factors of urban heat risk fundamentally shift depending on the analytical metric highlighted the necessity for a multi-layered climate justice policy framework.

The Korean Society of Climate Change Research is the largest academic organization in the ‘climate change’ field in Korea, with over 1,000 experts participating.