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Padang & Co's ASEAN Green Economy Landscape (formerly the Southeast Asia Green Economy Landscape) is an annual report published by Padang & Co. The 2026 edition, our third, maps over 1,000 startups and SMEs across seven key sectors in six ASEAN countries, and identifies opportunities for companies contributing to the region's Green Economy transition.
From Sustainability, to Abundance, to Resilience
Our purpose has stayed the same since our first report in 2024: to spark meaningful conversations and highlight actionable opportunities for the startups, scale-ups, and SMEs building Southeast Asia's green economy, the businesses turning sustainability from a cost into a source of jobs and growth.
This year we also changed the report's name, from the Southeast Asia Green Economy Landscape to the ASEAN Green Economy Landscape. It's a small change in wording, but a deliberate one. We believe the grouping itself, not just the countries within it, has a bigger role to play in building the region's green economy in the years ahead, through shared standards, infrastructure, and markets, rather than separate national efforts moving at separate speeds.
Startups, scale-ups, and SMEs are the engines of experimentation, agility, and practical innovation. They push boundaries, fill gaps in capability, and often commercialise the solutions that bigger players later adopt and deploy at scale. Much of the existing research on Southeast Asia's green economy speaks to governments, multilateral institutions, and large corporates, the organisations with the scale to move entire economies. But a green economy also needs innovation, and a lot of that happens outside the biggest organisations, through new technologies, new business models, new financing approaches, and new partnerships connecting markets. Our goal is to help startups, scale-ups, and SMEs see where they fit, and where they can lead.
Our own thinking has evolved with each edition. Sustainability, our 2024 theme, taught us to respect limits: reduce emissions, cut waste, live within what the planet can support. Last year we turned to Abundance, the idea that a green economy could be less about cutting back and more about building the capacity to do more. This year, our thinking has moved again, to Resilience.
It has been a testing year for the region. A confirmed Super El Niño is already reshaping harvests and water supply across Southeast Asia, while disruption at two of the world's most important shipping choke points, the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, has shown how much of the region's growth still depends on supply chains it doesn't control. Governments are responding: Singapore has named 2026 its Year of Climate Adaptation, and carries that agenda into 2027 when it takes the ASEAN chair, with collective resilience as one of its stated priorities.
This is why Resilience is this year's theme, built into the analysis rather than treated as a backdrop. We define it in three parts. Climate resilience is the capacity of ecosystems and communities to withstand physical shocks. Economic resilience is reduced dependence on fragile supply chains and imported inputs. Social resilience is whether a transition strengthens livelihoods and community stability, rather than displacing them.
Every opportunity we highlight in this Landscape was weighed against that lens, how it might move the region from fragility towards durable strength. As a catalyst for sustainable growth, Padang & Co is committed to supporting this transition, and to helping build a more resilient, prosperous, and sustainable region.
You can explore the dedicated ASEAN Green Economy Landscape website to access a filterable directory of all 1,148 mapped companies and download the PDF report here: http://aseangreeneconomy.com.
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Get Involved
We are looking for collaborators for future editions and hosts of ecosystem events, recommendations for startups, projects, and partnerships to spotlight, and partners to work with us to develop programmes. We would love to hear from you.
Adam A. Lyle, Executive Chairman
Derrick Chiang, CEO
