By Kimberly Tan, Dale Hardcastle, Yukiko Tsukamoto, Berakah Hyunbin Lee, Tracy Wong Harris, Justin Ma, Kyung-Ah Park
Southeast Asia is confronted with a reality gap between its Net Zero ambitions and true progress in its energy and green transition.
The region grapples with structural constraints, including the dual challenge of balancing economic growth and energy transition, a mismatch in supply and demand due to geographical dispersion of renewable resources, limited incentives for carbon reduction, and inadequate access to financing. These unique challenges require a multi-faceted systems-level change to accelerate the green transition. Furthermore, a significant investment gap to fund the transition continues to exist—an estimated US$1.5 trillion is required up to 2030, with only US$45 billion in investments made across dedicated green investments since 2021.
We believe that Southeast Asia has a window of opportunity that it needs to seize today to leverage the coming transition for competitive and economic growth beyond decarbonisation. This report will highlight the immediate investable decarbonisation ideas and accelerators that can help speed up progress. Comprehensive deep dives are featured alongside the top 13 investable ideas across four sectorial themes: Nature and Agriculture, Power, Transport, and Buildings. Finally, we discuss the five key accelerators that can help build ecosystems in the near term and bring investment to scale.
All stakeholders need to take collective action to be on track for emission targets and unlock US$300 billion in new revenue pools by 2030. The report highlights five priority actions:
- Focus attention on investable decarbonisation ideas
- Scale up policies and investments to incentivise corporate action
- Promote innovation in finance to catalyse investment
- Advance country and regional plans for the transition pathways
- Take action today while working on structural constraints
Written in collaboration with
The companies in which Carbon Solutions Platform Pte. Ltd. directly and indirectly owns investments are separate legal entities. In this article and presentation, “GenZero” is sometimes used for convenience where references are made to Carbon Solutions Platform Pte. Ltd. and its subsidiaries in general.
