OS Annual Report 2025: The Convergence

Obviously Sustainable has just recently launched its Annual Report 2025, "The Convergence: Where Green Meets Digital, Where Both Meet People." Reflecting on our third full year, the report captures a defining shift in our work: the green and digital transitions are no longer two parallel tracks, but a single, converging transition with shared consequences for people, institutions, and economies.

When we founded Obviously Sustainable, we spoke of the twin transitions as parallel journeys toward a more sustainable and inclusive future. Three years on, those tracks have merged. The digital transition now depends heavily on energy, and that energy sits at the centre of climate strategy. The green transition has become dependent on data, platforms, and computation. Green employment increasingly requires digital fluency, and digital livelihoods increasingly run on green logistics. This convergence offers extraordinary opportunity, but it also carries risk: when transitions fuse, they can compound one another's benefits, or equally compound one another's exclusions. Without a people-centred compass, a converged transition can accelerate in the wrong direction.

Shaping the Rules of the Convergence

As ASEAN's regulatory conversation accelerated in 2025, Obviously Sustainable positioned itself at the centre of the debate on how a computation-powered economy can stay powered by renewables. We convened the inaugural AWS Future Data Centre Forum in Jakarta, bringing ministries, investment authorities, and industry into one room around Indonesia's emerging Data Centre Roadmap, with one immediate outcome being a ministerial commitment to deeper coordination. We initiated a public policy partnership with AWS Malaysia on sustainable data centre development, and continued our embedded public policy work with Riot Games in Indonesia and Malaysia, helping position gaming and esports as credible contributors to the creative economy while contributing to Indonesia's child protection regulation.

Evidence From the Point of Convergence

Convergence depends on rigorous, local evidence. Across 2025, we delivered three research engagements grounding the twin transition in the realities businesses, workers, and communities actually experience. With the World Economic Forum, we implemented the Annual ASEAN Business Survey in support of the Digital Economy Framework Agreement, reaching 1,520 digitally enabled businesses across the region. With Riot Games, we conducted a VALORANT Community Insight Study in Malaysia examining how digital creative economies grow. And building on our 2024 forum with Grab, we managed a research grant programme on On-Demand Transportation Services, supporting academics across Indonesia to produce working papers and op-eds on technology ecosystems, gig work, and sustainable mobility.

People at the Heart of the Convergence

The risks of a converged transition, including faster displacement, deeper digital exclusion, and new forms of precarity, fall most heavily on those least equipped to absorb them. In 2025, our monitoring, evaluation, and learning partnerships brought overlooked communities into the conversation. We developed Traveloka's first standalone impact report, verifying 150,000 mangrove trees planted and more than 95,000 businesses trained in digital literacy. With FORUM-ASIA, we led a five-country evaluation supporting human rights defenders. With Penabulu Foundation, we reframed the care economy as serious economic infrastructure. And with the British Council, we evaluated Design Matters Lab, a cultural and design collaboration exploring circular, low-impact materials in Bandung.

Carrying the Conversation to the World

Policy and evidence move the world only when they are effectively communicated. In 2025, we brought Southeast Asia's perspective to international stages, from The Conduit and the London School of Economics to London Tech Week, TechEx Europe, and the ASEAN ICT Forum, ensuring the region's voice on a sustainable and inclusive transition remained visible where decisions are made.

A Year of Convergence, in Numbers

Across the year, our mission reached three continents and more than ten countries. We engaged 5,652 businesses and MSMEs across 15 markets, worked alongside 21 expert consultants, and delivered eleven partnerships at the meeting point of the two transitions. Throughout, we remained what we have always been: a social enterprise serving as a bridge between policy and practice, between global frameworks and local livelihoods, and between the pace of technological change and the patience a just transition requires.

Read the Report

The OS Annual Report 2025 is our fullest account yet of what convergence means in practice, and of the people-centred principle that must guide it. We are grateful to every partner, funder, community, and colleague who walked this path with us, and we look forward to what converges next, together.

Download the Report Here.

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