Scientific analysis and inter-Korean cooperation are needed to reduce North Korea’s environmental pollution and deforestation. Many efforts to reduce North Korea’s environmental issue have a fundamental weakness because they are generally influenced by internal and political conditions. To overcome such a weakness, two approaches may be effective; the first is to use new technology such as Google Earth and the second is to build collaborative governance that is invulnerable to political conditions. This study focuses on building collaborative governance models based on Google Earth data investigation, a previous research’s release of Google Earth database, and literature review of North Korea’s environmental issues. This research’s results are as follows. First, North Korea’s industrial regions suffer from environmental pollution and many other regions experience severe deforestation according to Google Earth-based spatial images. Second, we can discern environmental pollution such as air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, and deforestation using Google Earth-based spatial image. In reality, we are able to identify deforestation and partially soil pollution with Google Earth-based spatial image. Third, there are different environmental problems among North Korea’s local regions. South Korea has to prepare and plan various collaborative governance models depending on North Korea’s local needs on environmental problems.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the applicability of high spatial resolution remote sensing images for conducting the rural amenity resources survey. There are a large number of rural amenity resources and field reconnaissance without a sufficient preliminary survey involves a big amount of cost and time even if the data quality cannot always be satisfied with the advanced study. Therefore, a new approach should be considered like the state-of-the-art remote sensing technology to support field survey of rural amenity resources as well as to identify the spatial attributes including the geographical location, pathway, area, and shape. Generally high-resolution satellite or aerial photo images are too expensive to cover a large area and not free of meteorological conditions, but recently rapidly-advanced internet-based image services, such as Google Earth, Microsoft Bing maps, Bluebirds, Daum maps, and so on, are expected to overcome the handicaps. The review of the different services shows that Google Earth would be the most feasible alternative for the survey of rural amenity resources in that it provides powerful tools to build spatial features and the attributes and the data format is completely compatible with other GIS(Geographic information system) software. Hence, this study tried to apply the Google Earth service to interpret the amenity resources and proposed the reformed work process conjugating the internet-based high-resolution images like satellite and aerial photo data.