The Crisis: In December 2024, South Korea became a "super-aged" society, with 20.3% of its population aged 65 or over. Recorded lonely deaths (godoksa) rose to 3,924 in 2024, up 7.2% in a year and about 33% since 2019, and 81.7% of those who died were men. Korea's elderly relative poverty rate (39.8% in 2023) and elderly suicide rate (46.6 per 100,000) are both the highest in the OECD, at roughly 2.7 times the OECD average.

Measuring Risk: The study builds on the Loneliness Danger Rating (LDR) index, which combines the elderly living-alone rate, the elderly suicide rate, and the inverse of the welfare-facility rate into one standardized regional score. Applied to 243 municipalities, it ranked mountainous, rural Gangwon Province as the highest-risk region. The index shows that lonely-death risk is measurable, regionally patterned, and built from identifiable ingredients.

The Causes: A five-factor model explains why elderly Koreans die alone. Rapid population ageing and the growth of one-person elderly households drive the demographic force, and the OECD's highest elderly poverty (rooted in an inadequate public pension) drives the economic one. The other three are the erosion of family-care norms, chronic illness and depression, and uneven welfare services, especially in rural areas. These forces compound one another, so single-track interventions are not enough.

The Response: The paper proposes five mutually reinforcing pillars: income security, social connection, mental health, regional equity, and governance. Concretely, it calls for raising the Basic Pension, scaling up AI/IoT check-ins and community outreach (especially for older men), and targeting high-LDR regions. It also calls for funding the 2021 Lonely-Death Prevention Act and creating a national loneliness strategy, drawing on the UK, Japan, and Seoul's "Without Loneliness" plan, so that growing old in Korea no longer means dying alone.