Korea's 15-measure CBAM support package: the 13th joint government briefing reaches Gyeongsan

Four Korean government bodies brought their joint CBAM roadshow to Yeungnam University on September 2, 2026, promoting a package of 15 support measures for companies exporting steel, aluminium, cement, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen to the EU. The 13th Joint Government Briefing on EU CBAM Response, announced that morning and held at the Cheonma Art Center in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang Province, offered around 200 seats to company staff, according to Korean-language coverage. The event matters beyond one auditorium: Korea is among the most exposed CBAM exporting countries, and the measures on offer, from a help desk to free calculation software, are the state's answer to a well-documented readiness gap.

Who held the 13th joint CBAM briefing and what it covered

The 13th Joint Government Briefing on EU CBAM Response took place on September 2, 2026 at the Cheonma Art Center of Yeungnam University in Gyeongsan, organized jointly by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, the trade ministry, the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, and the Korea Customs Service. Aju Press reported the announcement on September 2, and Korean-language coverage lists a 1:00 p.m. start the same day, with one session on understanding the CBAM rules and a second on practical case sharing.

A naming note: the trade ministry's official English press pages now use Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources (MOTIR), following Seoul's 2025 government reorganization that created the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, while parts of the English-language press, including Aju Press, still write Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. The climate ministry's English name, Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, is confirmed by its own press releases.

The Gyeongsan session extends a series that official English releases have documented across 2026, listed below.

The series keeps returning to Korea's industrial heartland: a 2025 session ran in Pohang, home of POSCO, in November, and Gyeongsan sits in the same North Gyeongsang Province. Officials have framed the stakes consistently. At the April session, Deputy Minister for Trade Park Jung-sung said 2026 is the year CBAM begins to function as a real trade barrier and that Korean companies need to understand the revised rules, per the trade ministry's English release. At the June session, Han Min, Director General of the International Affairs Bureau at the Korea Customs Service, called 2026 a critical year for SMEs exporting to the EU, per the climate ministry's English release.

What the 15 support measures contain

The 15 support measures split into three categories: 6 measures strengthening capability for carbon emissions calculation, reporting, and verification, 5 measures for reducing carbon emissions, and 4 measures building the capacity of company personnel. The framework dates to a working-level meeting of the same four bodies on February 11, 2026 at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Ministry of SMEs and Startups repeated the 15-measure count in its release for the September briefing.

The three categories are summarized below.

Six concrete instruments stand out from the government releases and the briefing coverage.

• The EU CBAM Helpdesk, reachable at 1551-3213 on weekdays from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., gives one-on-one consultations on emissions calculation and reporting. It opened in October 2023 at the KOFMIA Building in Seoul under what was then the Ministry of Environment.
• CBAM-PASS, a carbon emissions calculation program the Korea Customs Service developed for SMEs, is being updated for the EU implementing regulation announced in December 2025 and will then be distributed free of charge, per the climate ministry's June release.
• A notification program for export declarants, listed among the support measures in the climate ministry's English releases, targets companies filing export declarations for CBAM goods.
• The SME CBAM Response Infrastructure Development Project subsidizes carbon measurement equipment and verification costs, with applications open until September 15, 2026.
• Consultants visit production sites to deliver company-specific assessments.
• Training sessions held in August let SME employees practice calculating carbon emissions directly.

The readiness gap the package has to close

The support package lands in a market where 99.3 percent of surveyed Korean exporters face customer demands for emissions data while two thirds manage that data without any shared platform. Those figures come from the August survey of 300 export companies in which Korean exporters reported near-universal carbon-data demands, conducted by the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Korea Industrial Complex Corporation. The same survey found 90.3 percent of exporters passing data demands down to their own suppliers, which multiplies the number of firms that need exactly the calculation and verification skills the briefings teach.

The financial stakes concentrate in one sector. A report covered on August 14 put Korean steel's CBAM exposure near USD 4 billion, with about 70 percent of national output on the carbon-intensive blast furnace route. The South Korea country profile explains the structural problem behind both numbers: the K-ETS deduction available under Article 9 of Regulation (EU) 2023/956 is small, so verified emissions data and actual decarbonization are the levers that remain.

What Korea's support package means for EU importers

For EU importers buying Korean steel, aluminium, or fertilizers, the package raises the odds that a supplier can hand over verified embedded-emissions data instead of leaving the declaration to fall back on default values, marked up by 10 percent in 2026 for steel and aluminium and by 1 percent for fertilizers. A supplier that has used the help desk, run CBAM-PASS, or gone through subsidized pre-verification is a materially better data source than one re-keying spreadsheets.

Three supplier checks follow for importers sourcing from Korea.

1. Ask whether the supplier has used the government instruments: the help desk, CBAM-PASS, the consulting visits, or the infrastructure subsidy.
2. Send a structured request for installation-level data using the supplier data-request generator, and reference the Korean support programs in it, since the supplier's cost of answering has dropped.
3. Confirm the resulting figures can survive an accredited audit, as described in the guide to CBAM verification for non-EU producers.

What happens next

The rollout continues through the autumn: applications for the SME infrastructure project close on September 15, 2026, EU verifier registration opened on September 1, and CBAM certificate sales begin February 1, 2027. The data that Korean suppliers produce with this support feeds the first annual CBAM declaration, due September 30, 2027, covering calendar year 2026 imports. Korea's bet is that 15 targeted measures, repeated city by city, close the gap between near-universal data demands and the spreadsheet reality documented in August. For importers, every Korean supplier that takes the offer is one less default-value line in that first declaration.