It took Singapore less than 60 years to transform from a colonial port into one of the world’s fastest growing and most technologically advanced city-states, a feat with few parallels in modern history. But sitting at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore also finds itself in the middle of rising seas, intensifying heat and erratic rainfall. As a regional hub for finance, technology and policy, the country has drawn a new generation of climate thinkers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Two recent additions to the city are M.A. in Climate and Society alumni Amanda Chen (CS’24) and Anuka Upadhye (CS’25), who moved to the country precisely because it is serious about change and the opportunities therein.
Upadhye is a policy fellow in energy at US-ASEAN Business Council. She works on energy policy across Southeast Asia and advises decarbonization strategies and regional energy integration. Raised in water-scarce Arizona, Upadhye became environmentally aware at a young age. Because her father worked in Singapore, she also spent many summers there. Upadhye’s familiarity with Singapore made her want to try moving there after graduation on Singapore’s Work Holiday Pass, which allows young graduates to live and work in the country for up to six months with no prior job offer required.
“Singapore is in a very unique position because they face a lot of land constraints, so there are few ways for them to generate their own renewable energy. Singapore is pushing for integrated energy systems throughout ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), so that renewable energy produced in other countries can be brought back to Singapore. There’s a very distinct, coordinated effort for countries to come together to work on climate change and energy security in a way that I haven’t really seen. The ASEAN power grid is the best example,” according to Upadhye.
The logic behind the ASEAN power grid is that shared resources create shared stakes, which benefit small countries and discourage conflict. This is not new, nor is it limited to Southeast Asia. In 1950, France and West Germany’s coal and steel industries were pooled under a joint authority, explicitly aiming to render war between the two “materially impossible.” This declaration was the beginning of the European Union as we know it today. In the Middle East, Ecopeace, a trilateral NGO, aims to bring Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli environmentalists together around a proposed water-energy exchange: solar energy produced in Jordan would be exchanged for desalinated water from Israel and Palestine. This would establish an interdependent relationship where each party would become more resource secure within a framework of broader regional cooperation. While the climate crisis is the largest global crisis we have faced, its universality is perhaps its greatest opportunity. Since no one can opt out, more countries will be forced into resource interdependencies that have historically been peacebuilding, exemplified through the ASEAN energy grid.
While governments negotiate energy grid infrastructure, Chen sees an equally important front in climate tech startups that build sustainability into the fabric of everyday life. Chen was born in California but spent her teens at an international school in Taiwan before landing at Yale-NUS in Singapore for college, and Columbia Climate School for her master’s degree. She moved back to Singapore after graduating in 2024, and currently works as a portfolio acceleration analyst at Wavemaker Impact, a venture capital firm that builds climate tech companies that work to reduce emissions at scale.
What has surprised Chen the most has been how quickly climate tech products that address everyday needs have taken off. One company selling solar lights and solar fridges has done incredibly well in rural Philippines. An agricultural biostimulant derived from seaweed is finding traction with farmers in Indonesia. “I’m seeing how sustainability can become embedded in everyday decisions when it aligns with how people already live and spend,” she says.
In Singapore, both Chen and Upadhye have found a culture where addressing climate change feels possible and urgent, rather than perpetually deferred. That this optimism lives in a particularly climate-vulnerable country makes it all the more noteworthy. “I just didn’t think certain products would fly due to low consumer awareness,” Chen says, “but I’ve seen things scale really fast and land in people’s lives in ways I didn’t anticipate.”
Singapore’s solution-based approach has been striking to both alumni, in part because of how sharply it contrasts with the climate discourse they left behind. In the U.S., climate change has long been an ideological battleground rather than a problem to be solved. Upadhye hypothesizes that there is more fear of an energy transition in the U.S. because of the legacy of oil and coal production; whole populations built around extraction industries fear for their jobs. “Similarly, in Singapore, people are scared of the AI boom because they’re afraid it’ll take their jobs,” she says, “but the Singaporean government actively reinforces exactly what they’re going to do to ensure people keep their jobs even after this technological revolution. I don’t see that same commitment to U.S. citizens who worry about an energy transition to renewables.”
Upadhye points out that climate optimism exists in the U.S. as well. “I felt a lot of optimism doing my master’s at Columbia and seeing how much my peers cared… Everyone always showed up and was like, ‘What are we going to do about this? How are we going to move forward?’ That energy is the most important thing to hold on to.”
