Publication: Green Horizon: East Asia’s Sustainable Energy Future
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2025-08-26
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2025-08-28
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This overview lays out pathways to decarbonize the power and industrial sectors of the East Asia region, sectors that together constitute an overwhelming majority of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) emanating from these countries. With a specific focus on China, Indonesia, and Viet Nam, which together account for 80 percent of region’s emissions and represent 88 percent of the region’s coal consumption, the report argues for a stepped-up role of renewables in driving the region’s ambitious growth agenda, net zero targets, and industrialization and urbanization trajectory. Combining desk research, private sector surveys, stakeholder consultations, and quantitative modeling - and drawing from World Bank’s widespread operational footprint in the region - this overview presents the barriers to be addressed to up transition from a coal dominated system in the power sector and then to create the conditions for technological interventions in industrial sectors—improving energy and material efficiency, increasing electrification, and adopting advanced technologies such as green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. This overview – an amalgamation of two reports on renewable energy and industrial decarbonization in the region, is a follow-up to a 2010 World Bank report titled "Winds of Change: East Asia’s Sustainable Energy Future".
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“World Bank. 2025. Green Horizon: East Asia’s Sustainable Energy Future. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43646 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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To offer just one more example, rainfall and freshwater availability could decrease by up to 40 percent for some MENA countries by the end of this century. The urgent challenge is how to adapt to the future as illustrated by these numbers and how to turn the region's economy onto a sustainable path. This volume suggests new ways of thinking about the complex changes and planning needed to achieve this. New thinking will mean making better use of desert land, sun, and salt water the abundant riches of the region which can be harnessed to underpin sustainable growth. More mundane, but just as important, new thinking will also mean planning for dramatically better management of the water already available. Right now, water is very poorly managed in MENA. Inefficiencies are notorious in agriculture, where irrigation consumes up to 81 percent of extracted water. Similarly, municipal and industrial water supply systems have abnormally high losses, and most utilities are financially unsustainable. In addition, many MENA countries overexploit their fossil aquifers to meet growing water demand. None of this is sustainable while water resources decline. This volume hopes to add to the ongoing thinking and planning by presenting methodologies to address the water demand gap. It assesses the viability of desalination powered by renewable energy from economic, social, technical, and environmental viewpoints, and it reviews initiatives attempting to make renewable energy desalination a competitively viable option. The authors also highlight the change required in terms of policy, financing, and regional cooperation to make this alternative method of desalination a success. And as with any leading edge technology, the conversation here is of course about scale, cost, environmental impact, and where countries share water bodies plain good neighborly behavior.
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