This week, Greenpeace France took a stand and, in a valiant act of environmental activism, took matters into their own hands. At sunrise on Wednesday, May 21, activists aboard the Arctic Sunrise ship dropped 15 very large limestone boulders into the Mediterranean Sea, targeting a protected area off the coast of Occitania known as the Gulf of Lion Marine Park.
Carefully placed in a grid pattern on the ocean floor, each rock weighs between one and two tons. That is equivalent to a fully grown male White Rhino! The goal was to physically block bottom trawlers—large fishing vessels that drag heavy nets across the ocean floor, a practice that has devastating impacts on marine ecosystems.
This action is the latest effort in an ongoing campaign highlighting the French government’s inaction on marine conservation. Greenpeace is calling for a ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas (MPAs) before France co-hosts the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC-3) in Nice in June.
The Gulf of Lion is a vital and diverse ecology in the Mediterranean, renowned for its rich biodiversity. There are magnificent habitats like Posidonia meadows, Coralligenous reefs, which support vulnerable marine life including gorgonians, sea cicadas and bluefin tuna.
Although officially designated as a marine protected area, the region remains vulnerable to industrial fishing, which François Chartier, Oceans Campaigner at Greenpeace France, says undermines the very meaning of protection. “For several years now, France’s refusal to regulate destructive activities in its marine protected areas has been unanimously denounced by NGOs and numerous scientists,’ said François Chartier, Oceans Campaigner at Greenpeace France ‘The government still holds to an archaic vision of marine conservation and fishing. Agnès Pannier-Runacher refuses to comply with international standards on levels of protection in MPAs, preferring instead an unfounded “case-by-case” approach. The Minister must heed our request, which is also that of all ocean protection associations: she must ban bottom trawling in marine protected areas.”
This isn’t Greenpeace’s first move on the issue. In December 2024, the group exposed the presence of trawlers on the Bancs des Flandres, another protected zone. In April, it collaborated with CNRS to publish a report recommending a more meaningful and science-driven layout for MPAs across French waters. Now, by installing physical barriers in the form of boulders, Greenpeace is escalating its campaign to force the government’s hand.
Activists aboard the Arctic Sunrise displayed banners that read “The government doesn’t act, we do” and “Marine area protection in progress.” It served as a direct affirmation of France’s stated dedication to ocean protection.
A critical opportunity to protect our oceans
With the UNOC-3 just weeks away, France has a critical opportunity to protect our big blue planet. While President Emmanuel Macron has made bold international pledges—opposing deep-sea mining and supporting the High Seas Treaty—it’s time for those global ambitions to be ratified. To truly lead on ocean conservation, France must start by securing the health of its own marine environments.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific is also calling on newly elected Environment Minister Murray Watt to ratify the Global Oceans Treaty within the first 100 days of office. Furthermore, Greenpeace Australia Pacific would like Minister Watt to propose a world-first high seas marine protected area in the Tasman Sea. This aims to protect marine life, including blue sharks, from the harmful impacts of industrial fishing.If you would like to learn more about Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s involvement, you can do so here.
A Rock-Solid Stand for the Ocean: Greenpeace France Blocks Bottom Trawling
When oil and gas shipments stopped flowing through the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the Iran war, Southeast Asian nations were left reeling as the supply crunch laid bare their acute reliance on fossil fuel imports.
As prices soared, governments in the region scrambled to introduce emergency energy-saving measures – from a four-day working week to curbs on air conditioning. Thailand revived decommissioned coal plants while the Philippines, which imports nearly all of its oil, declared a “national energy emergency”.
But the crisis has also prompted renewed resolve to find a long-term solution to their vulnerability at a time when electricity demand is booming to power the region’s growing industry, cooling needs and the mushrooming of energy-hungry data centres.
At the heart of Southeast Asian nations’ response is a longstanding infrastructure project to connect the region’s power grids by 2045 and enable cross-border trading of clean electricity through a network of underground and subsea interconnectors.
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The plans will allow nations with high renewable energy generation potential to trade surplus power to their neighbours and major demand centres like Singapore, helping to integrate more renewables into the power mix and reduce reliance on fossil fuel imports.
“[It] will give us more energy security,” the Philippines’ energy secretary, Sharon Garin, told a press conference after a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) energy ministers last week, when they discussed accelerating the delivery of the regional grid as part of measures to respond to the energy crisis.
“The Philippines is rich in solar power, Malaysia is rich in hydropower and Indonesia has geothermal: different countries have different resources. [The ASEAN Power Grid] will optimise the utilisation of renewables to the benefits of each member state,” said Garin.
But turning this decade-old political vision into a reality has been slow, held up by painstaking work to harmonise a patchwork of regulatory and legal frameworks and mobilise the private capital needed to build cross-border infrastructure.
More than $300 billion is needed to expand and modernise the region’s fragile grids to support the projected energy demand increase by 2050. This includes $27 billion required to deliver the cross-border interconnections by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Every year of delay could cost the region billions of dollars in additional fuel costs and lock in new gas infrastructure for decades to come, according to analysis by global energy think-tank Ember.
The building block for energy security
With electrification high on the agenda of the COP31 climate talks in Türkiye next month, there is growing attention on the need to modernise and expand grid infrastructure to cope with growing electricity use and more renewables in the power mix.
Clean electrification and energy efficiency could deliver about a third of cumulative carbon emission reductions between 2026 and 2050, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook. But delivering that would require doubling annual global grid investment to $1 trillion between now and 2035.
Last month, the UN launched an initiative to accelerate investment into expanding and modernising grids in Southeast Asia and Africa.
First conceptualised in 1997, the ASEAN Power Grid has gained fresh impetus in recent years as countries turn to renewables to cut their emissions and move away from volatile fossil fuel markets.
Energy supply disruption caused by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East has strengthened the case for regional grid connections. Before this year’s conflict began, the Middle East accounted for 60% of Southeast Asia’s crude oil imports. Competition for fewer, more expensive oil and gas shipments has left Southeast Asia facing a $160 billion energy import bill this year. Based on current policies, this could rise to $400 billion by mid-century.
In the Philippines last week, energy ministers agreed on an enhanced planning framework to deliver the ASEAN Power Grid and made progress on regulatory guidelines.
Garin said ministers were considering accelerating the project’s delivery. “The first study was to connect [by] 2045 – that’s too far,” she said.
A strong business case
The economic benefits of the plan have “captured the political imagination” of leaders in the region, Robert Cooke, grids advocacy lead at the Global Renewables Alliance, told Climate Home News. “The business case is stronger than ever,” he said.
“If countries were to go about building their own separate grids, of course that would be an expensive endeavour. But the discussion around the ASEAN Power Grid includes what costs could we share in building out this grid,” added Tiza Mafira, director of the Indonesia office for the Climate Policy Initiative.
Stronger grids would help the region meet collective targets to increase the share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply from 14% to 30% and in installed power capacity from 34% to 45% by 2030.
Connecting and pooling dispersed renewable resources would also help smooth local power shortages caused by daily and seasonal variations, reducing the need for backup gas plants and battery storage.
The IEA found the ASEAN Power Grid could help unlock some of the 20 terawatts of untapped solar and wind potential across Southeast Asia – an amount around 55 times the region’s current total power capacity.
From lines on a map to shovels in the ground
Rather than building a single unified network, the ASEAN Power Grid is developing cross-border links between neighbouring countries and smaller groups of nations.
As of 2025, nine of 18 priority interconnection projects are operational – accounting for around 10 GW of capacity with an additional 13.7 GW planned by 2040.
Source: Ember
A power line channelling up to 200 MW of clean electricity generated from hydropower in Laos to Singapore via Thailand and Malaysia has emerged as a key building block for grid-to-grid trading.
Progress on technical discussions will also help provide the clarity the private sector needs to invest in bankable projects, said Cooke.
In 2025, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank announced a dedicated funding initiative to support the project.
“The enabling pieces are emerging,” said Monalisa Dimalanta, former chair of the Philippine Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Renewable Energy Board. “But the timelines remain unclear and a 2045 vision cannot answer today’s emergency,” she said.
“A power grid… that exists only on paper will not keep the lights on.”
Singapore: the delivery test
The implications of failing to deliver the ASEAN Power Grid are most acute in Singapore.
Constrained by space, with few renewable energy resources and dependent on gas for more than 90% of its electricity mix, Singapore has emerged as a leading proponent of a regional power grid as it seeks to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
To meet its power needs, the city-state aims to import 6 GW of low-carbon electricity by 2035, around one-third of its energy demand – a target which it is set to miss, however.
The plans heavily rely on building interconnectors to import solar power from Indonesia across the South China Sea. Around 40% of the ASEAN Power Grid’s planned interconnections are directed towards Singapore.
Ember’s analysis found that delivering the planned interconnectors by 2035 could enable renewables to meet nearly half of Singapore’s electricity demand. Delays could drop this to only a fraction of the country’s needs, and risk locking in new gas capacity until the 2050s. Without the ASEAN Power Grid, Singapore would need to install an additional 300 MW of gas-fired power capacity to bridge the gap by 2035.
Already home to the largest data centre capacity in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s electricity demand keeps rising, driven by the boom in AI infrastructure. “At one point, [it] either has to build a new gas plant, or it has to get the interconnection to supply that demand,” Lam Pham, an Ember energy analyst and the report’s author, told Climate Home News.
A region at a crossroads
With capital increasingly available, political will is now the biggest risk standing in the way of timely execution, said Pham.
But there are other challenges too, including the lack of frameworks on transmission tariffs and how to share the benefits of clean power trading. “It’s really hard to justify projects without that,” he said.
In addition, climate-fuelled weather events, including extreme heat and tropical storms, pose major threats to the region’s grid infrastructure. Experts say stronger grid interconnection can isolate damage and build the system’s resilience.
Efforts to deliver on the ASEAN Power Grid also come as ministers stressed the “continued importance of oil and gas” for economic development and seek to secure fossil fuel supplies and stockpile oil to prepare for the next crisis.
Despite an acceleration of renewable deployment, particularly solar, coal still generates nearly half the electricity supply in ASEAN member states and dominates the power mix in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, while Singapore and Thailand rely on gas.
While these measures might help the region with the immediate crisis, “the long-term answer is more domestic renewable energy, electrification, storage, efficiency and regional power trade”, Dimalanta said.
Main image: An aerial view of the MTerra solar project in the Philippines, set to become one of the world’s largest solar-and-battery developments (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
The post SE Asia speeds up plan for connected clean power grid after oil shock appeared first on Climate Home News.
SE Asia speeds up plan for connected clean power grid after oil shock
Climate Change
“Sink or swim”: WA Gov hugely underestimating decline in regional gas demand while sleeping on green exports, new report finds
PERTH, Tuesday 13 October 2026 — A new report from Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Springmount Advisory reveals green commodity exports are an untapped economic opportunity for Western Australia in a declining Asian gas market, while offering a genuine solution for decarbonising Asia.
From Gas to Green: Building Western Australia’s Future State is a comprehensive analysis of the declining gas market in Asia, and the untapped economic opportunity for WA to become a global leader in green commodity exports while driving the regional shift away from fossil fuels.
The report offers key recommendations for the WA Government to support regional decarbonisation through an orderly phase out of gas exports in favour of green iron and other green exports. It comes as global climate leaders from across business, politics and advocacy prepare to meet for the Global Citizen Now: Perth event focused on decarbonising WA.
Key findings:
- Gas demand is falling across WA’s core markets in Asia: Gas demand fell in 2025 and is projected to continue to decline, driven by a combination of global geopolitical factors and domestic concerns.
- Policy shifts in key markets since the war on Iran now prioritise renewables and nuclear over gas: Japan, South Korea and China have legislated energy plans that prioritise renewables and nuclear over gas.
- New WA gas would arrive in a saturated, uncertain Asian market filled with cheaper gas: The US is now the world’s largest liquefied gas producer and plans to double its capacity as it also targets Asian markets.
- Green commodities offer a real solution to sustain WA’s economy: WA can lead Australia’s green commodity exports, which by 2060 could be worth almost a trillion dollars.
- Exporting more WA gas is likely to delay or impede Asia decarbonisation: Despite claims by the gas industry, there is no evidence that WA gas is displacing coal in Asia, and in fact diverts resources from genuine decarbonisation options.
Geoff Bice, WA Campaign Lead at Greenpeace Australia Pacific said: “As our export partners in Asia shift away from expensive and polluting gas, the WA Government has a golden opportunity to pivot our economy to green exports, like green iron, which is the most effective way to help our region to decarbonise.
“The writing is on the wall: gas is in decline, renewables are our future. In this context, it makes zero sense for the government to encourage high risk projects like Woodside’s reckless Browse gas proposal at Scott Reef.
“This report clearly shows that the WA Government faces a choice: sink or swim. They can either allow the gas industry to keep ripping off West Australians and continue propping up its decline, or choose the path that will deliver enormous benefits to the state and the world by becoming a leader in the rapidly expanding green economy.”
Tom Quinn, Managing Director of Springmount Advisory: “Western Australia prospers when it looks to the future and builds for future demand. Twenty years from now, what the world needs is green commodities made using WAs abundant renewable resources. Just like it did with iron ore in the 1950s and gas in the 1970s, WA should look to the future and build what the world will need, not sunsetting industries like gas that are already past their peak.”
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Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lucy.keller@greenpeace.org
A report from Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Springmount Advisory reveals the untapped green economic opportunity for Western Australia in a declining Asian gas market, which also offers a genuine solution for decarbonisation in Asia.
Is Western Australia clinging to a fading gas industry while a thriving green future passes it by? As major Asian trading partners rapidly pivot away from volatile gas imports toward cheap solar and battery storage, this report exposes a high-stakes choice: risk becoming stranded in an oversupplied fossil fuel market, or harness WA’s unmatched sun and wind to lead the global clean energy transition.
