By Mehmet Enes Beşer The atmosphere in the capitals of Southeast Asia is growing increasingly unmistakably fatigued when it comes to climate finance. All those repeated promises from the developed world to mobilize billions on the behalf of climate mitigation and adaptation in the Global South have come woefully short. From unpaid commitments under the Paris Agreement to sluggish disbursement ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer The environmental sustainability experience of Southeast Asia is an uneven and rugged terrain, shaped by forces that intersect but refuse to move together in harmony. As the ASEAN countries speed up to discover the middle path between economic development and nature protection, they must contend with the unbalanced consequences of the leading drivers—digitalization, natural resource exploitation, ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer There is a stunning paradox at the core of the Southeast Asian model of development, a paradox more desperate with each climate summit, energy crisis, and investment diversion. The ASEAN bloc has subscribed formally to world climate targets. Its member states have made Nationally Determined Contributions, committed net-zero emission goals (some as early as 2050), and ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer The year has conspired to make ASEAN’s end-October Leaders’ Summit in Kuala Lumpur unusually consequential. Malaysia, chairing under the banner of “Inclusivity and Sustainability,” must navigate a denser-than-usual thicket: renewed tariff salvos from Washington, the still-bleeding crisis in Myanmar, the slow-moving South China Sea code of conduct process, and the long-promised—but only recently bankrolled—push for regional ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer Southeast Asian urbanization is a demographic tendency—it is additionally a political, economic, and ecological milestone. As urban masses swell with countryside-to-city migration, increased incomes, and urban infrastructure expansion, the region grapples with a query squarely at the hub of sustainable growth: can ASEAN urbanize without eroding its ecological carrying capacity? The answer, increasingly, is located in ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer Short-sea shipping has been the backbone of maritime Southeast Asia for centuries. From Singapore and Manila ports to Indonesia’s sea lines of the archipelago and the inland water transport network of the Mekong Delta, short-sea shipping is an economic driver and a logistics imperative. Yet even as it plays a vital role in intra-regional trade, ASEAN’s ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer The promise of a “New Malaysia” first captured global attention in 2018, when a surprise electoral upset ended sixty-two unbroken years of Barisan Nasional coalition government. Pakatan Harapan coalition win—and return to politics of veteran politician Mahathir Mohamad—was welcomed as a democratic victory, a harbinger that Malaysia was poised to redefine itself politically, economically, and diplomatically. ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer ASEAN’s transformation into one of the globe’s most dynamic economic blocks has been spurred as much by domestic reform as by two strong exogenous drivers: financial growth and globalization. They have opened up capital markets, penetrated cross-border investment, and connected ASEAN economies into global supply chains on a previously unheard-of scale. But whereas this convergence has ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer While nearly 110 million people worldwide remain undernourished, and more than 30% of all food produced is lost or wasted, the irony of food deficiency as well as over-consumption in ASEAN is both an ethical and a strategic issue. Not only is food loss a terms-of-art contradiction of fundamental equity—it’s also a silent but powerful engine ...
By Mehmet Enes Beşer As ASEAN countries race along their pursuit of cleaner, diversified energy systems, biofuels are a politically appealing, domestically sourced answer to rampant fossil fuel prices and greenhouse gas emissions. From Indonesia’s massive palm oil plantations to Thailand’s cassava fields that churn out ethanol, the region is blessed with biomass resources theoretically suitable for conversion into renewable ...