Southeast Asia Summit on Prosperity and Sustainability

Southeast Asia Summit on Prosperity and Sustainability
May 19 - 20, 2025
Stanford University

Overview | Agenda | Speakers | Roundtables | Venue

Stanford University is convening 400 thought leaders and decision makers from businesses, governments, and academic institutions across Southeast Asia and the United States. The Southeast Asia Summit on Prosperity and Sustainability, hosted by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and organized by Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy and the Woods Institute for the Environment, will explore energy security and food security as they support robust sustainable economic prosperity and regional security in Southeast Asia. The focus will be on the eight (of ten) countries with developing economies, which have GDP per capita of less than US$14k a year.

Southeast Asia is a region of 10 nations (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) with around 700 million people who are multi-dimensional in many respects - ethnicity, language, religion, geography, history, and form of government.  The region, often equated with the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN, is the 3rd most populous region in the world (after India and China), has a collective economy of US$4 trillion in nominal terms (the 6th largest globally after the US, European Union, China, Germany, and Japan), and traverses over 5,000 km (longer than the distance between San Francisco and New York) and 5 time zones (1 time zone less than the longitude of the US) from the westernmost town of Thandwe in Myanmar to the easternmost town of Merauke in Indonesia.  The region’s economic diversity is manifested in terms of economic size (Laos at US$15 billion and Indonesia at US$1.5 trillion), income per capita (Laos at less than US$2,000 per capita and Singapore at more than US$91,000 per capita), and the degree of modernity (only Brunei and Singapore are electrified at more than 10,000 kWh per capita).

The seemingly irreconcilable nature between the need for modernization or development and the narrative of sustainability is dauntingly inescapable for most of Southeast Asia and other developing economies around the world. This wedge also serves as a paradox that the global community must be sensitive to when crafting the most realistically acceptable remedy and balance between scalability and environmental friendliness—without jeopardizing the developing economies’ need to achieve multilateral collaboration and their sustainable development goals.

This is a by-invitation-only event.