The country set its national temperature record on Aug. 2, when Yangsan in South Gyeongsang reached 42.5 degrees Celsius at 1:26 p.m., the highest reading in 122 years of modern observation, the Korea Meteorological Administration said.

Korea JoongAng Daily reported the city broke the national mark on two consecutive days and stayed above 40 degrees Celsius for five days running.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency counted 3,237 heat illness cases and 28 suspected heat deaths between May 15 and Aug. 8, and a joint government statement on Aug. 6 found six in 10 of those who died were 80 or older.

President Lee Jae Myung called the heat a national disaster at an Aug. 4 cabinet meeting and two days later ordered ministries to strengthen protection for elderly people living alone and residents of single-room housing districts.

Livestock deaths reported to the state disaster insurance scheme reached about 998,000 animals as of Aug. 7, including 944,234 poultry and 54,299 pigs, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs said. Money Today reported that birds made up roughly 95% of reported losses.

Warming seawater killed the 1.83 million farmed fish, with high-temperature alerts covering 31 of the country's 35 coastal zones by Aug. 10, according to Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries figures.

Farmers harvesting during a heatwave in Andong, South Korea. Photo by Reuters

In Yanggu county, 130 km northeast of Seoul, potato farmer Lee Sang-hyuk dug into soil that heat had turned into something closer to an oven and found nothing worth saving, a week after the crop had looked fine.

"It's not just one or two fields like this. How can I even put it into words? It's so upsetting," he told broadcaster SBS, which reported the Gangwon farmer had worked the land for 40 years without seeing a season like it.

About 257 km south of Seoul in Gwangju, watermelon grower Hong Kyung-hee watched fruit that would normally sell at a premium turn soft.

"The inside was good, the sweetness was good, everything was fine," he told KBS from his farm. "But after three days it changed overnight like this. In my 50 years of farming, this is the first time."

Strawberry farmer Yoon Woo-ha in Damyang county in the southwest lost seedlings she had cultivated over three months, and the damage falls outside what her insurance covers.

The state scheme extends only to designated crops, growing methods and regions, and Nongmin Sinmun has documented cases where policyholders were refused payouts because they planted while a heat advisory was in force.

"When the insurance can't cover this, it goes straight into farm household debt," Lee Jun-kyung, who heads the Gwangju chapter of the Korean Peasants League, told The Guardian.

Revised disaster insurance and relief laws take effect Aug. 15, and the agriculture ministry said on Aug. 13 that they will write abnormal high temperatures and earthquakes into the legal definition of an agricultural disaster, along with pest damage caused directly by extreme heat, and will exclude losses from disasters ranking in the worst 10% on record from future premium calculations.

Recovery support expands from replanting costs to production costs a farmer had already sunk before the damage. Extreme heat will still require case-by-case certification from a government deliberation committee, since unlike a typhoon it triggers no automatic weather alert.

Japan, China and South Korea all recorded their hottest summer on record last year, the World Meteorological Organization said in its State of the Climate in Asia 2025 report, which found Asia warming roughly twice as fast between 1991 and 2025 as during the 1961 to 1990 baseline period.

Japan logged its first kokushobi, or "cruelly hot day," on July 21, when Tajimi and Gujo in Gifu prefecture and Toyota in neighboring Aichi all topped 40 degrees Celsius, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

The agency created the category in April after a national survey drew about 478,000 responses.

Three lionesses died within a week at Tama Zoological Park in western Tokyo and 10 of its 16 lions fell ill, with the zoo telling AFP that veterinarians suspected heatstroke after finding dehydration and multiple organ failure.

Hong Kong recorded 36.9 degrees Celsius on Aug. 9, its hottest since records began in 1884 and above the 36.6 set as Typhoon Hato approached in 2017, the Hong Kong Observatory said.

Subsiding air on the outer edge of Typhoon Dolphin, then tracking toward Zhejiang about 1,000 km to the northeast, drove the reading up. Sheung Shui in the New Territories hit 39.8.

The Ayding Lake station in Turpan, Xinjiang, reached 50 degrees Celsius on July 21, China's first national-level 50-degree reading of the year, China Daily reported.

North Korean state television said Pyongyang hit 36.7 degrees Celsius on Aug. 6, the highest since records began in the capital, Reuters reported, after the Korean Central News Agency described a run of nights in which temperatures never fell below 25.