Vision and Challenges of Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC)

This chapter outlines the vision and key challenges of the Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC) as a regional platform for advancing decarbonization cooperation in Asia while sustaining economic development. AZEC brings together 11 partner countries and is guided by two core principles: the “triple breakthrough”, which pursues climate action, inclusive economic growth, and energy security simultaneously, and “one goal, various pathways”, which recognizes that transition routes must differ across countries given heterogeneous energy systems, resources, and institutional capacities. The chapter also summarizes the background motivation for AZEC by drawing on ERIA’s analysis of carbon pricing and carbon market development, emphasizing the importance of making decarbonization efforts measurable, comparable, and economically meaningful through emissions visualisation and high-integrity market frameworks. Building on this foundation, the chapter identifies practical challenges for implementation, including balancing flexibility with minimum common foundations, managing short- and medium-term tensions between transition speed and energy security, addressing uneven implementation capacity, and fostering credible cooperation on carbon markets and crediting. The chapter concludes by positioning AZEC as a pragmatic “implementation-oriented” framework whose effectiveness depends on translating broad principles into workable regional cooperation and investable actions.