"China is Southeast Asia’s biggest public funder of clean energy with US$2.7bn in investments: study" 4 June 2025

China is the leading source of public clean energy investments in Southeast Asia over the last decade [...] according to a report by international research organisation Zero Carbon Analytics.

But despite the increase in green financing in the region, it might not translate into a renewables shift [...] Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia leaning back on extractive industries as they scramble to adjust [...].

If countries in the region find that trade-offs of investing in green energy are too high, they will revert to “tried and tested methods of their old industrial strategy” instead of bearing the short-term pains of decarbonisation [...].

[...] China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has increasingly focused on green development.

[...] it has also supported a wide range of green projects in Asean, such as solar projects in Indonesia and Myanmar, hydropower plants, solar farms and transmission networks in Cambodia.