2026, the Year of Resilience

2026 is the year the world crossed the line it spent three decades trying to avoid. UNEP's latest assessment confirms global warming will breach 1.5°C within the next few years; the best realistic pathway left is now an "overshoot, peak, and decline" back down, rather than holding at the threshold itself. As UNEP's Inger Andersen puts it, climate impacts will "strike faster, hit harder, and last longer." For a region that contributes least to the problem and stands most exposed to it, this is the environment this Landscape was written in.

Two events this year showed exactly what that looks like in practice. A Super El Niño, confirmed this September as one of the strongest on record, is forecast to peak in early 2027 and is already reshaping harvests and water supply across the region – the kind of acute climate shock that tests, directly, how much capacity ecosystems and communities have built to withstand it. 

Alongside it, two of the world's most important shipping choke points came under pressure this year. The Strait of Hormuz, carrying a fifth of the world's oil and a third of its fertiliser inputs, has been disrupted since 28 March 2026, with crude exports down by nearly half and food security risk spreading well beyond the Middle East. The still-unfolding situation at the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which carries ~12% of global trade, could add to the global challenges. Together, they are a reminder of how much of Southeast Asia's growth still depends on supply chains it does not control.

Governments in the region are already responding. Singapore has named 2026 its Year of Climate Adaptation, reviewing the country's heat, coastal, water and food resilience ahead of its first National Adaptation Plan. Singapore carries that agenda into 2027, when it takes the ASEAN chair with collective resilience as one of its three stated priorities alongside regional integration and community building. This is a recognition that no single member state can adapt, or compete, alone. 

That push continues at COP31, which convenes in Türkiye this November, preceded by a pre-COP in Fiji and a leaders' event in Tuvalu that will keep the Pacific's adaptation needs, and by extension the region's, close to the centre of the agenda.

This is why resilience is this year's theme, and why we have built it into the analysis rather than treating it as a backdrop. We define it in three parts:

How We Score Resilience

In this section, we have identified top stories for each sector in 2026 (so far). For each top story, we have given a score for the three types for resilience and ordered the stories according to first their climate resilience score, then economic resilience score and finally, social resilience.  

You'll see these ratings on every top story across the seven sector profiles — start with Nature, Agriculture & Food, the largest sector.