Asia Pacific

Launched in October 2020 with hopes to raise AU$300 million over five years, Regenerate Australia aims to rebuild the ecosystem devastated by the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires. Project goals include doubling the number of koalas on the country’s east coast by 2050, rebuilding forests and rewarding renewable energy production achievements to make the country more resilient to future crises.

For many Muslim policewomen, a hijab is a fundamental part of their uniform. Yet without headgear specifically made for use in the line of duty, many women made do with improvised solutions—which meant that they didn’t always feel welcome. The New Zealand Police in Christchurch collaborated with the Nga Pae Mahutonga Wellington School of Design at Massey University to develop a fit-for-purpose hijab, a project that was completed in November 2020.

Charles Sturt University announced a partnership with the Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre in May to create Australia’s first fully automated, “hands-free” farm. Remote sensors will collect information on plants and soil, while AI algorithms manage when and where to sow and harvest in environmentally sustainable ways. Fully autonomous tractors and harvesters will carry out the dirty work, no farmhands required. When complete, the Global Digital Farm will produce commercial crops—such as wheat, canola and barley—and also be home to a vineyard, cattle and sheep. The project is intended to demonstrate the viability of a robot-run farm, while also educating local farmers in the use of data analytics, geospatial mapping, remote sensing, machine learning and cybersecurity.

The beauty biz can have an ugly impact on the planet, with less than 10 percent of plastic product containers able to be recycled. South Korean beauty conglomerate AmorePacific is slowly overhauling its packaging across its global portfolio, including developing a paper bottle for its Innisfree brand that slashes the plastic content by more than half. But in October 2020, the company went further than making a better bottle, unveiling the country’s first beauty refill station. The pilot project lets customers fill coconut-shell containers with 15 different types of beauty products, then pay by weight.

Japan’s Sony rewrote the gaming playbook for PlayStation 5 (PS5) with a radical departure from its previous console iterations. The PS5 was bigger, more powerful and way more immersive. Within five months of PS5’s November 2020 debut in North America and Europe, Sony had sold 7.8 million of the machines—which PlayStation’s president declared the biggest console launch in history. According to Sony, users logged 81 percent more time on the console in early 2021 than they did during a similar post-launch period for the PS4.

Nearly 300,000 people cross the Malaysia-Singapore border daily for work—making it one of the busiest land border crossings in the world. And it’s about to get a whole lot faster with a new 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) rapid transit system. By 2026, once the under-construction line is complete, the system is expected to move 10,000 passengers an hour in each direction, cutting border-crossing down to a mere five minutes. The megaproject is the brainchild of RTSO Link, a joint venture formed in 2020 by public transport companies from each country: Prasarana Malaysia Bhd and SMRT Corp. Ltd. And company leaders are determined not to let the pandemic stand in the way of project progress—awarding RM1 billion in contracts for systems in May.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore launched the Singapore Financial Data Exchange (SGFinDex) to help residents get a fuller picture of their financial wellness. Built on Singapore’s National Digital Identity (called SingPass) and developed in partnership with seven banks, SGFinDex is a digital portal that collects financial information from government agencies and private financial institutions, allowing people to view everything from credit card balances to bank deposits, loans and investments in one place. The government also developed a digital financial planning service called MyMoneySense that uses SGFinDex to offer personalized financial planning advice.

Public toilets are more than a matter of convenience. They’re an essential part of making cities cleaner, healthier, more accessible and more tourist-friendly. Yet they’re often treated as an afterthought, left dirty and in disrepair—if there are even any to begin with. No matter how many cities invest in improving the state of public restrooms, perhaps none can do it with the elevated style of The Tokyo Toilet.

Facing soaring energy demands, Singapore is out to quadruple solar power production by 2025. But with heavy cloud cover and just 726 square kilometers (280 square miles) of land, the tiny country has limited options. So the space-starved city-state is getting creative: introducing a 45-hectare (111-acre) floating solar farm that will power its water treatment system—making Singapore one of the few nations in the world with the capability. A partnership between Sembcorp Floating Solar Singapore and the country’s Public Utilities Board, the 60-megawatt farm could help reduce Singapore’s carbon emissions by about 32 kilotonnes annually, comparable to taking 7,000 cars off the roads.

Japan’s largest online secondhand marketplace, Mercari, unveiled a new ecommerce platform that allows any of its 7 million monthly users to open their own online store with a few taps of its smartphone app. Completed in July, the project marks another coup for the small-but-mighty startup: It rolled out its own digital currency in 2019, and also this year partnered with Uber to roll out a logistics fulfillment service called Mercari Local.