Greenlit to Go Green
Issue 53 — Key Developments Across the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam
Editor’s Note
by Karen Ysabelle R. David, Lead Editor - Pacific Corridor Desk
In a world where natural disasters grow ever more frequent and ever more worse due to climate change, the disaster-prone countries of Southeast Asia are racing to find a way to slow the threat. This week in the Pacific Corridor, the Philippines and Vietnam are heeding the green light to go green.
For the Philippines, digital transformation and the green transition go hand-in-hand. But can the former really bring about the latter when the country’s electricity system and the hundreds of thousands of tons of electronic waste that it generates are not exactly shining examples of sustainability? Vietnam is navigating a similar paradox, as its accelerating policy push for a circular economy outpaces the reality on the ground. Hanoi must move beyond promises and policies if it hopes to make any difference at all.
But for the young people of Singapore this week, climate anxieties are a distant worry when compared to the frustrating reality of a confusing entry-level job market. In the absence of government policy, Singaporean youth are addressing the issue of youth unemployment by taking matters into their own hands.
Singapore 🇸🇬
When Students Build What Institutions Won’t: Singapore’s Youth-Led Job Intelligence Movement
by Ryan
In Singapore’s increasingly opaque entry-level job market, a small but growing cohort of students and recent graduates has taken matters into their own hands. One of the most notable results is didtheyghost.me, an open-source, community-driven platform that allows applicants to track internship applications, log interview timelines, and flag companies that never respond. Built by job applicants for job applicants, the platform describes itself not as a job scraper or another job board, but as something closer to an archive of the application experience itself, helping users to answer burning questions like how long it typically takes to hear back from a given company. A parallel community-maintained GitHub repository for Singapore’s Summer 2026 tech internships has already logged 439 commits from contributors adding and verifying listings, a quiet but telling display of collective self-organization.
These tools did not emerge in a vacuum. Just 74.4% of 2025 university graduates in the labor force secured a full-time job, down sharply from 87.5% of their 2022 counterparts, while the proportion unemployed and actively searching rose to 10.5% from 3.6% in 2022, and the median gross monthly salary has held flat at SGD4,500 for two consecutive years. Layered atop these cyclical pressures is a structural one: artificial intelligence (AI). The anxiety in Singapore is measurable: almost 30% of respondents in NTUC’s 2026 economic sentiments survey felt anxious that AI would replace their job, prompting the union to launch its AI-Ready SG initiative in February 2026, offering 50% subsidies for AI tools and training alongside structured learning pathways.
Singaporean students are not waiting passively for conditions to improve. Faced with a hiring market that increasingly values demonstrated experience over academic credentials, many are pursuing multiple internships before graduation. Most NUS, NTU, and SMU undergraduate programs already include at least one formal internship, with SMU requiring ten weeks as a graduation requirement, but for competitive students the curricular minimum has become a floor rather than a ceiling. The perceived value of internships among graduates rose to 38% in 2025 from 28% the year before, while only 23% now view academic results as an important factor in the job market. Students are simultaneously building portfolios of independent projects and pursuing AI certifications, with 59% of Singapore graduates believing AI skills provide a competitive edge, well above the global average of 40%. The graduating class of 2026 is also screening out roles that do not disclose compensation at a significantly higher rate than previous cohorts, signaling that this generation approaches the job search with a level of market intelligence that earlier cohorts lacked.
The challenge is not unique to Singapore. In Indonesia, unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 stands at 16.26%, the highest of any age group, and despite a national internship program, structural gaps persist. The Philippines recorded youth unemployment of 12.2%, prompting a new ten-year National Education and Workforce Development Plan. Vietnam’s youth unemployment rate among those aged 15 to 24 sits at 9.0%, four times the national average. Malaysia fares better, with graduate unemployment at 3.2% and overall unemployment falling to 2.9% by late 2025, the lowest since 2014, though skills mismatches remain a persistent concern across the region. Across all these markets, it is young people themselves who have most clearly diagnosed the problem and moved fastest to address it, whether by coding platforms to track hiring transparency, stacking internships to build real-world credibility, or upskilling into AI at a pace that institutions have struggled to match. In an environment where the rules of entry-level employment are being rewritten faster than policy can respond, that resourcefulness may prove to be the most transferable skill of all.
Ryan is a final-year finance student at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) with experience across venture capital, venture debt, and business development. He also holds a diploma in Law and Management from Temasek Polytechnic. His interests lie in how emerging technologies and economic trends shape business ecosystems and regional development in Asia.
The Philippines 🇵🇭
Why the Philippines needs a Green Foundation for Digital Transformation
by Arianne De Guzman, in Bulacan
Digital transformation and the green transition are considered as mutually reinforcing goals. While the former emphasizes economic growth and innovation, the latter prioritizes sustainability and climate resilience.
On 2 June 2026, Philippine Department of Trade (DTI) Secretary Ma. Cristina A. Roque stated that the recently signed ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) is anticipated to boost investments to strengthen digital transformation and participation in the Philippine digital economy. The DEFA projects that the value of ASEAN’s digital economy will double in value to US$2 trillion by 2030, as it will accelerate cross-border digital trade, electronic commerce, digital payments, cybersecurity, and data governance.
“For the Philippines, the DEFA is set to bring real benefits to everyday Filipinos,” DTI Secretary Roque said. The agreement is expected to strengthen digital participation in the country and empower micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMES) by creating job opportunities.
While the economic benefits of digital transformation are becoming clearer, the green transition also becomes another major policy objective.
At first glance, digital transformation can help advance environmental goals, as it can reduce paper consumption, streamline transactions, and build efficient systems. In actuality, each online payment, AI-generated response, or cloud-based service relies on data centers, a facility where data is stored, processed, and transmitted.
As the Philippines positions itself as a data center hub in Southeast Asia, power demand is expected to increase substantially. Data centers require a significant amount of electricity and water through power grids and cooling systems, and generate volumes of electronic waste, contributing to carbon emissions and environmental pollution.
This creates a central policy dilemma: digital transformation depends on electricity, but its sustainability depends on how that electricity is produced. The Philippines’ electricity system is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, with coal supplying about 60% and natural gas 18%, indicating that over three-quarters of power comes from non-renewable sources. In contrast, renewable energy adoption remains uneven, with greater reliance on geothermal and hydropower, while solar and wind still account for only a small share.
The same tension appears in electronic waste. In 2022, the Philippines generated around 537,000 metric tons of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), the highest volume in Southeast Asia. According to the 2024 Global E-waste Monitor published by the United Nations, the country remains the region’s largest producer of e-waste. This also provides another reflection about technological advancement — it reinforces the culture of rapid replacement, where electronic devices are continuously produced and discarded even when they remain functional. Green transition, in this sense, cannot rely on recycling alone. It also requires revisiting how technology is valued, designed, consumed.
Tools such as energy monitoring, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting systems, and access to green finance platforms are now digital by default. Businesses and institutions with digital capacity should be better able to comply with sustainability requirements and access climate-linked investment.
Digital transformation is not the core problem; the question is whether the Philippines is capable of adequately addressing its ecological implications. The Philippines thus finds itself navigating a dual transition: balancing the pursuit of digital advancements, all while keeping in mind ecological well-being.
This dual transition is contingent upon whether digital transformation is matched by balanced investments in digital infrastructure and clean energy and stronger environmental governance. Without this alignment, digital transformation risks undermining the very sustainability benefits it seeks to achieve.
Arianne has experience in policy research at De La Salle University’s Jesse M. Robredo Institute of Governance, where she contributed to projects on systemic reform. She earned a degree in Political Science from Colegio de San Juan de Letran. Currently, she works in government relations, specializing in advocacy strategy, legislative monitoring, and stakeholder engagement. Beyond her professional work, she is actively involved in youth development and grassroots initiatives through the Rotaract Club of Santa Maria.
Vietnam 🇻🇳
Vietnam’s Circular Ambition, Linear Reality
by Hang Nguyen, in Ho Chi Minh City
Vietnam’s accelerating policy ambitions for the post-2025 period have placed the circular economy alongside the digital and green economies as a core engine of the country’s new growth model. The 14th National Party Congress Resolution explicitly mandates that Vietnam “develop the digital economy, green economy, circular economy” and pursue “green conversion, energy transition, and structural transformation” as interlinked national priorities. Yet, as with the twin tensions between green and digital transitions explored previously, the circular economy presents its own paradox: an increasingly robust legal scaffolding that has, so far, failed to translate into meaningful behavioral change on the ground.
The policy trajectory has been swift. The term “circular economy” did not appear in any official Vietnamese document before 2016. By 2021, it had entered Party political discourse for the first time through the 13th Party Congress Resolution. The Law on Environmental Protection (2020) provided the first statutory definition — framing the circular economy as an economic model aimed at reducing raw material use, extending product lifecycles, and minimizing waste — and introduced Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) obligations for producers of plastics, electronics, batteries, and tires. Decision No. 687/QD-TTg followed in 2022 with ambitious quantitative targets: a 15% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per GDP and recycling of 85% of plastic waste by 2030. Most recently, Decision No. 222/QD-TTg (January 2025) established a National Action Plan for Circular Economy by 2035, while Decree 110/2026/NĐ-CP and Decree 29/2026/NĐ-CP have refined EPR obligations and introduced a domestic carbon trading system, respectively.
The breadth of this regulatory output is considerable. The challenge, however, lies not in the absence of legislative ambition, but in the gap between policy intent and operational reality — a pattern that should be familiar to observers of Vietnam’s broader development strategy. The circular economy’s legal definition, enshrined in the 2020 law, remains narrowly environmental in orientation, focusing on emissions and waste reduction, all while overlooking the model’s deeper economic logic: optimizing resource flows across sectors, linking production chains, improving labor productivity, and generating new economic value. This framing limits policy instruments to environmental tools and fails to engage the business community on genuinely economic terms.
Compounding this is the fragmentation of relevant regulations across multiple laws — environmental protection, natural resources tax, forestry, and consumer rights — without a unifying framework or dedicated coordinating agency. Empirical research on circular agriculture in Vietnam’s Central Highlands found that national government mandates had a statistically insignificant influence on actual farm-level adoption of circular practices, underscoring the disconnect between top-down directives and ground-level behavior. The EPR system, while codified, is still embedding itself in producer compliance routines, and recycling infrastructure outside major urban centers remains severely underdeveloped.
For the circular economy to move beyond its current status as a well-documented aspiration, Vietnam must treat institutional architecture as the central reform priority. This means designating a coordinating body with cross-ministerial authority; synchronizing incentive structures across tax, finance, and procurement policy; and building the decentralized implementation capacity that local governments currently lack. Without this shift, Vietnam risks repeating the same pattern it faces in its green and digital transitions: coherent strategy, fragmented execution.
Hang is a young researcher with academic experience in Vietnam and the United States. She has previously worked in public relations at the U.S. Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City and the YSEALI Academy. Her research focuses on ASEAN centrality in the evolving Asia-Pacific landscape, with particular attention to Vietnam’s approach to trade, regional cooperation, and political economy in the face of external power dynamics and global volatility.
Editorial Deadline 16/06/2026 11:59 PM (UTC +8)
