Southeast Asian economies confront a pivotal challenge as they seek to balance economic growth with meeting critical emission targets. Energy efficiency (EE) and demand-side management (DSM) represent significant near-term opportunities that remain underutilised despite their impact on emissions reductions and potential to reduce ‘carbon lock-in’.
Clime Capital Management and Village Energy are developing REMI, which will support the deployment of EE and DSM technologies in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
REMI will empower the commercial and industrial sectors to operate more efficiently through retrofitting existing equipment and energy use optimisation using proven, scalable technologies. REMI will also facilitate new ways for grids and consumers to shift energy consumption throughout the day to optimise for cost and emissions reductions, reduce overall peak demand, optimise energy use, and facilitate greater penetration of renewable sources of power into electrical grids.
Overall, REMI will:
Taken as a whole, REMI will promote more resilient and energy-efficient economic growth and crowd-in more investment into the low-carbon transition, while creating new jobs in the clean technology sector and helping countries achieve their own emissions reductions targets.
Jatropha has long been positioned as a high yielding oil crop without the food vs fuel conflict. The major focus of Jatropha is to produce oil for biodiesel (a less carbon-intensive fuel). However, Jatropha has been explored several times in Indonesia and failed.
Since the last wave of interest in the late 2000s, JOil, a joint venture founded by Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, has conducted significant research and development into Jatropha, resulting in new high-yielding seeds, a refined agronomic approach and a whole plant utilisation approach to maximise revenue generation from the plant.
Since 2016, Sinar Mas subsidiaries have worked with local communities to improve their economic well-being through our Desa Makmur Peduli Api programme (DMPA). Unsustainable activities like illegal logging or using fires to clear fields remain common practices in Southeast Asia; the DMPA provides local villagers with alternative means to farm without deforestation or use of fires.
In this project, Sinar Mas couples the exploration of an enhanced Jatropha value chain with new economic opportunities for rural communities. As Jatropha can grow in relatively poor soil conditions and areas with relatively low rainfall where other oil crops might fail, communities can make use of otherwise unproductive land to supplement and diversify their income, strengthening their resilience to economic and climate change shocks. In addition, the project will bring management to the land, thereby reducing risk of fires and deforestation.
Today we all know the importance of investing in human capital development, and increasingly, as early as possible. Around the world, future income loss for young children who missed out on early learning and development will be the highest – with an estimation of USD$1.6 trillion. And while investment in early childhood and education development (ECD) programming has the highest social and economic return potential – estimated at USD$17 for every USD$1 – there are still very differing levels of commitment and investment in the space in Southeast Asia and Asia in general.
Some countries have established solid integrated national policies and yet others are still struggling to move towards that objective. A common challenge in the region is the lack implementation of systemic governance and policies at both national and local levels, including limited availability of contextualised models and investments.
Tanoto Foundation aims to leverage its learning experience and bring this to other countries and areas, in order to replicate the journey, increase awareness of the importance of early years investment and create contextualised ECD models focusing on the Southeast Asia region.
Education is often a path out of poverty, improves health and strengthens the economic well-being of whole communities. Yet funding for most low-income students remains out of reach. Government funding and scholarships are unable to fill the gap and private capital remains scarce.
UBS Optimus Foundation, through the Asia Higher Education Accessibility, aims to help underserved students particularly from low-income backgrounds gain access to high-quality tertiary education that is relevant for labour market needs, and therefore leading to employment.
Asia Higher Education Accessibility will identify, support, and bring to scale solutions that:
In particular, it will focus on solutions such as income share agreements – whereby a student receives upfront funding to cover their study costs and commits to pay back a percentage of their future income over a specified period of time; loans or other financial instruments that are based on the student’s potential to thrive in the future; as well as solutions that are investible.
Linked to this present initiative, a global Tertiary Education Financing Prize was launched by UBS Optimus Foundation and Convergence, to identify the scalable student financing solutions that will contribute to increasing funding for tertiary education.
The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that preparedness for infectious disease threats is a core mission for countries globally. But what preparedness interventions to invest in, and how much, are important questions that need answers. There is currently limited evidence on the return on investment on pandemic preparedness interventions.
The Jameel Institute at Imperial College London, in partnership with Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), Programme for Research in Epidemic Preparedness and Response (PREPARE), aims to forge the world’s first initiative on integrated epidemiological-economic modelling of pandemic preparedness. This novel and innovative multi-disciplinary programme will bring together epidemiological, economic, business and social research expertise, drawing upon advanced methods of data science and analytics.
The programme aims to project human and economic costs associated with future pandemics under alternative preparedness scenarios. An interactive online dashboard for 150+ countries will allow users to compare the projected costs of preparedness investments against their potential benefits. Additionally, the programme will seek to build local capacity, and provide in-depth analyses of topical issues through country-specific case studies.
Delivering robust business cases of pandemic preparedness, the programme will help governments, businesses and international organisations make optimal decisions for the benefit of populations around the world.
There are more than 350 million individuals with rare diseases globally; half of the afflicted are children and 30% of the affected children will die before the age of 5. Patients with rare diseases often undergo a diagnostic odyssey, with visits to multiple specialists and given 2 to 3 misdiagnoses, hampering timely treatment and consuming healthcare resources.
Advances in genomics have made it possible for many patients with rare diseases to be diagnosed within weeks. This reduces unnecessary investigations and allows for more precise care and therapy. However, in ASEAN, many children with rare diseases remain undiagnosed, especially those from low-income families and less well-resourced countries.
Genomic studies on rare diseases focus largely on white European populations. This lack of diversity harms scientific understanding of the genetic underpinnings of disease in populations such as ASEAN.
This 3-year programme, Genomics for KIDS in ASEAN, leverages the expertise of SingHealth Duke-NUS Maternal and Child Research Institute to bring genomic technologies to the underserved populations of ASEAN to achieve the following: