by De Xian Chong, External Contributor
Ask a young Southeast Asian about the maritime issues shaping the region, and the answer will likely begin with the South China Sea dispute, coast guard confrontations, and flashpoints in contested waters. While these form the most visible part of the story, a wider set of maritime issues also shapes coastal livelihoods, climate exposure, food security, infrastructure resilience, and access to future opportunity across Southeast Asia.
With ten of eleven Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states being coastal states, the sea defines the region’s geography, economies, weather, and food supply. The maritime domain is therefore an integral part of the region’s strategic, political, economic, and social landscape, with direct effects on the peoples of ASEAN, and in particular on its youth.
Youth aged 15 to 34 make up around a third of ASEAN’s combined population, with many of these young people living near the coast or in communities tied closely to fisheries, ports, shipping, marine tourism, and the wider coastal economy. For this generation, maritime issues shape the conditions under which they will live, work, and adapt.
Maritime pressures affecting young lives
A 2021 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies has described Southeast Asia as being on the front lines of climate change, plastic pollution, and fisheries stress. UNICEF estimated that more than 120 million children in East Asia and the Pacific are highly exposed to coastal flooding, while more than 210 million are highly exposed to cyclones. In the Philippines alone, UNICEF recorded 9.7 million child displacements between 2016 and 2021, with about 60 per cent of the population living by the ocean and sea levels rising at up to four times the global average. The Asian Development Bank has also found that Southeast Asia bears more than 42 per cent of global annual damage from coastal flooding, estimated at over US$26 billion each year.
ASEAN member states accounted for around 20 per cent of global fishery production in 2022, yet surging global and regional demand has left 64 per cent of the region’s fisheries base at medium to high risk. The ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity has warned that, under current practices, viable fish stocks could be exhausted as early as 2048. In fishing and coastal communities, these pressures shape household incomes, if local work remains viable, and whether younger people see a future at home. In Indonesia, climate change has driven fishers to migrate to Jakarta in search of livelihoods, often settling in informal coastal neighbourhoods with limited access to sanitation, housing, and schooling. In the Philippines, a landmark assessment of 44 coastal towns found that 68 per cent of their fisheries were unsustainable, and reclamation projects from Cavite to Cebu have steadily reduced local fish supply and displaced long-established fisherfolk communities. These pressures cut directly into education choices, migration patterns, household security, and community stability.
A November 2024 survey of more than 2,700 Gen Z and millennial respondents across the region also found that employment opportunities rank among the most pressing issues for 76 percent of Gen Z respondents, while 44 percent identified environmental protection as a major concern – both issues sit squarely at the intersection of the maritime domain. Ports, shipping, fisheries, marine services, coastal management, and maritime technology will continue to shape Southeast Asia’s future, yet these sectors may not be front-of-mind when younger people think about work, training, and advancement.
Why the youth angle matters
Ocean-dependent communities, including youth, are disproportionately affected by maritime insecurities and competing pressures linked to the ocean economy, yet they often remain marginal to decision-making and maritime governance. For younger Southeast Asians, that imbalance carries long-term consequences, since they will live longest with coastal climate stress, resource strain, marine pollution, and economies deeply dependent on maritime trade and infrastructure.
However, engagement is more than a matter of fairness. Young people across the region are already generating solutions that formal institutions have been slower to develop. The UNDP-supported ASEAN Blue Innovation Challenge has surfaced youth-led ventures tackling concrete maritime problems: projects such as retrieving discarded fishing gear in Myanmar, turning old fishing nets into tiles in the Philippines, and making biodegradable materials from coconut waste in Indonesia.
Youth networks can also mobilise at a reach that formal regional or national processes may miss out. Bye Bye Plastic Bags, an Indonesian youth-founded initiative, has reached over 50,000 students across more than 20 countries and helped shape Bali’s provincial plastic-bag ban. Save Philippine Seas has mentored more than 600 marine conservation leaders across Southeast Asia and backed 130 youth-led community projects. These ground-up organisations reach audiences, drive behavioural change, and generate citizen-science data that institutional channels may miss.
Young people in coastal communities also hold ground-truth knowledge the sector is short on. Studies of community-based fisheries co-management in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam have found that when local youths are brought into decisions, resource conflicts drop and food security improves. USAID’s work on small-scale fisheries across the Indo-Pacific has similarly shown that youth and women already do essential, often invisible, work along fisheries value chains, and that formalising this work through training, credit access, and value-added processing is among the most effective ways to keep the sector viable as older generations retire.
What should change
Part of the challenge lies in how maritime issues are usually presented. In much of Southeast Asia, they still appear mainly through disputes, sovereignty, law enforcement, and inter-state coordination. That language remains necessary, but it has become the dominant register of discussion, and it narrows how maritime issues are understood. The ASEAN Maritime Outlook shows how broad the maritime agenda already is, spanning connectivity, fisheries, labour, tourism, transport, and science and technology alongside security. It acknowledges that many maritime challenges directly affect the welfare of the peoples of ASEAN, but that breadth still does not come through clearly enough in wider public discourse.
Closing that gap calls for two reciprocal moves. Regional youth dialogues on resilience, skills, sustainability, and future opportunity should treat maritime pressures as a recurring thread rather than a specialist concern. Maritime discussions, in turn, should routinely draw in younger people working on coastal, fisheries, environmental, infrastructure, and community issues. At present, the two tracks run largely in parallel, touching similar terrain but rarely meeting.
The scope of youth engagement itself also deserves to be widened. Existing ASEAN youth conversations have largely clustered around a familiar set of themes such as employment and entrepreneurship, digital skills, education, climate action, and civic participation. Maritime concerns tend to surface only when a crisis or flashpoint forces them into view. Coastal livelihoods, blue economy careers, fisheries sustainability, marine pollution, and coastal climate adaptation fit naturally alongside the themes already in play, and speak directly to the realities many young Southeast Asians live with.
Framing, though, is only half of the shift. It will need to be matched by the quality of participation once young people are in the room. Three things matter in particular. The first is engagement at the shaping stage of policy, so that young people inform positions as they are being formed rather than respond to positions already set. The second is involvement in delivery, which takes seriously the fact that many maritime policies land in coastal communities where young people are already adapting, organising, and responding on the ground. The third is making adequate space for young Southeast Asians to set their own agenda on maritime affairs, as legitimate interlocutors rather than beneficiaries of programmes designed elsewhere. ASEAN’s existing youth and sectoral processes already offer much of the scaffolding required; the work ahead is to connect them with greater intent.
Towards a wider maritime conversation
Southeast Asia’s maritime issues will continue to involve security, diplomacy, and statecraft. They also involve coastal climate risk, strained livelihoods, vulnerable infrastructure, food security, and uneven access to opportunity. These pressures already shape how many young people across the region live, work, and plan their futures.
Treating the maritime domain as a wider conversation, and treating young Southeast Asians as participants in shaping it, are two sides of the same move. A region whose median age is thirty cannot afford a maritime agenda that speaks past the generation most exposed to its pressures and most invested in its future. Nor can it afford to treat their involvement as symbolic. Much of the practical work, from adapting coastlines and rebuilding fisheries to closing the loop on plastics and staffing the blue economy, will fall to them.
The headlines will continue to focus on the visible flashpoints. The more consequential maritime story is the one unfolding in coastal neighbourhoods, fishing households, and the choices young Southeast Asians are making about whether to stay, leave, or build something new. That story deserves a fuller conversation, and a generation ready to help lead it.
Edited by Thant Thura Zan, Frontier Analysis Editor
