As climate leaders gather in Singapore for Climate Group’s Asia Action Summit, Asia should be seen for what it now is, not only one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, but also one of its most important climate solution hubs. That distinction matters because it changes how we think about climate action in the developing world.
For too long, the story has been told in the language of deficits: not enough finance, not enough technology, not enough institutional capacity. The implicit assumption has often been that solutions will be designed elsewhere and then delivered, at some cost, to those who need them most. But that is no longer the full picture.
Across Asia, governments, businesses and institutions are proving that climate action can be developed in ways that are affordable, practical and grounded in the realities of emerging economies. In doing so, they are not only helping their own societies transition. They are producing models that other developing countries can adapt, scale and build on. This may be one of the most underappreciated shifts in global climate action today.
The first reason is affordability. For many developing countries, the greatest barrier to climate progress is not ambition; it’s cost. Clean energy, resilient infrastructure and low-carbon technologies cannot remain the preserve of wealthy markets. They must become viable in places where public resources are stretched, development needs are urgent, and energy demand is still rising. Asia has been central to making that possible by driving down costs through scale, industrial learning and competitive supply chains.
India is a powerful example. According to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, India’s cumulative solar capacity had reached 143.6 GW by the end of February 2025, including 24.86 GW of rooftop solar. That scale matters not only because it lowers emissions at home, but because it builds supply chains, expands markets and normalises clean energy at a price that is far more achievable for the other developing countries. When a country of India’s size builds demand and deployment at that level, it changes what is economically possible well beyond its borders.
Indonesia offers an equally relevant lesson. The Cirata Floating Solar Plant in West Java, inaugurated in November 2023, has a capacity of 145 MW, or 192 MWp, making it the largest floating solar plant in Southeast Asia. Built on a reservoir rather than on scarce land, it is designed to power around 50,000 homes while avoiding an estimated 214,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. That matters because many developing countries are not only short of finance; they are also constrained by land, urban pressure and competing development needs. Cirata shows how renewable energy can be expanded under those conditions without intensifying pressure on land use.
The second reason Asia matters is relevance. Most of the developing world is at a similar vantage point: dense cities, infrastructure gaps, industrial growth, fiscal pressure, rising energy demand and growing exposure to heat, floods and water stress. That similarity makes Asia’s climate leadership important and relevant. The region is facing climate impacts now, not in some distant future. That means many of the solutions emerging from Asia are not polished models designed for perfect systems, they are practical responses to difficult realities.
Vietnam is a good example. In July 2024, it created a framework for direct power purchase agreements between renewable energy producers and large electricity consumers. In simple terms, this opens a more practical route for factories and major users to buy renewable power directly, helping unlock private investment while supporting industrial decarbonisation. For export-oriented economies facing pressure to clean up supply chains, this is the kind of policy innovation that matters; it’s a tool for making the transition work in the real economy.
Vietnam is also showing why distributed energy matters. Rooftop solar is becoming part of how Vietnam thinks about power security and transition at the same time. By 2025, the grid already included more than 105,000 rooftop solar systems with total installed capacity of roughly 10.2 GWp (Giga Watt peak) and policymakers are now pushing further by pairing rooftop solar with storage to reduce grid pressure, strengthen resilience during peak demand and widen participation in the clean-energy transition.
Korea’s contribution is different again, but equally important. The International Energy Agency notes that Korea launched its first Energy Storage System Central Contract Market in July 2025 as part of a wider effort to strengthen battery storage and longer-duration storage technologies. It has also been advancing the regulatory foundations for a clean hydrogen economy. As more countries add variable renewables, they will need more than solar panels and wind turbines; they will need storage, grid-balancing tools and cleaner industrial fuels. Korea is helping build that next layer of climate solutions.
The third reason is cooperation. Asia is demonstrating that increasingly, countries are learning from one another, sharing policy experience, building industrial ecosystems and shaping forms of South-South cooperation that are often more practical and politically resonant than one-way transfers of expertise. And it’s vital, as the recent Iran conflict has shown, with its deep impact on the region: collaboration builds resilience. India’s solar scale, Indonesia’s floating solar innovation, Vietnam’s power-market reforms and Korea’s work on storage and hydrogen are different in form, but together they show a region experimenting, learning and building in real time.
Climate Group’s Future Fund helps states and regions in developing and emerging economies access capacity-building, peer learning, and international platforms to strengthen climate action. The Next Generation Budgets programme supports subnational governments in aligning public spending with climate goals. Together, they advance South-South cooperation by giving Global South governments practical tools, shared knowledge, and peer networks to adapt and scale climate solutions across similar development and resilience challenges.
Philanthropies and climate funders should pay much closer attention. Too often, Asia is still viewed primarily through the lens of need: a region exposed to escalating climate risks, adaptation burdens and development pressures.
Asia is also one of the most strategic places in the world to invest in climate solutions that can scale. Supporting climate action, also financially, in Asia is a way of backing systems change in terms of affordable clean energy, smarter grids, resilient infrastructure, industrial transition and implementation pathways that travel far beyond national borders.
The question is no longer whether Asia should be part of the global climate story, but whether the world is ready to recognise that some of the most important answers are already being built here.
Dr. Divya Sharma is India Executive Director; she will be at the Climate Group Asia Action Summit 2026. Know more about the summit here.
To arrange for an interview, contact ashrivastava@climategroup.org.