After a brief introduction of carbon neutral and circular-economy zero waste cities concept and sharing of key lessons from selected projects of the Asian Development Bank in the People’s Republic of China and Mongolia, the panel discussion will explore how this concept and experience can be applied in other parts of the region.

This session shares the experience gained from managing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in the PRC. The panelists from the region will explore how other countries can benefit from each other’s experiences in the region.

Reinventing the Grid will discuss how the transmission and distribution grid would need to be designed to accommodate a fully decarbonized future, while simultaneously coping with climate change acute and chronic impact, using California as a case study. The session encompassed the total system architecture impacts of the changes in physical and operational layer architecture and the advanced technologies that will ultimately be needed to execute this transformation.

5G is positioned as the key technologies to support Energy Internet as a reliable and secure communication infrastructure that provides ubiquitous connectivity for Energy Internet. This presentation summarized various existing and future communication services for domains such as generation, transmission, distribution, and power consumption. It also discussed the network architecture design for various applications to provide connectivity or serve as the redundant communication channel to provide improve the communication system reliability and resiliency for the power grid.

Coral reefs protect against natural hazards by reducing wave energy by an average of 97%. Reef crests alone dissipate up to 86% of this energy. Mineral Accretion Technology, which is more than 40 years old, can be used to grow protective barrier reefs using pre-fabricated steel structures and low-voltage electricity (similar to that used for charging mobile phones) to grow CaCO3 (limestone) using minerals dissolved in seawater.

Following a 5-month long conflict between armed groups and the Philippines government security forces in Marawi City, USAID advanced a multi-pronged menu of sustainable and targeted solutions for internally displaced persons (IDPs) across different sectors. The package of quick response development assistance was designed to alleviate the sufferings and improve the plight of roughly 360,000 IDPs.

Over the last decade, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has experienced a proliferation of development partners and projects, with a resulting increase in the transactional burden on national personnel and government departments. Projects have tended to be stand-alone, with limited cooperation between funders.