At the Seminar 6 on "Regional knowledge sharing and identification of opportunities for enhanced reduction of Marine Plastics Debris" held during the ASEAN-Japan Environment Week during August 22-24, 2023, Hotta made a keynote presentation to provide discussion points for the following panel discussions. This seminar was orgnaized with the following background and purposes. East and Southeast Asian regions are recognised as the biggest contributors to marine plastic pollution due to rapid economic growth, unsustainable production and consumption patterns, and the lack of appropriate waste management infrastructure.ASEAN member states are also taking initiatives through regional and national policy responses including launching of ASEAN Regional Action Plan for Combating Marine Debris (2021-2025) and development of national action plans in respective countries.With an ongoing process for developing an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution through Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) in mind, this event aims to (1) share the progress made thus far in the region in its combat against marine plastic debris, (2) formulate a regional input to the INC process, and (3) explore the areas of future ASEAN-Japan collaboration at this commemorative year of ASEAN-Japan relations.

Ensuring sustainable consumption and production (SCP) patterns in the Asia region is a high-priority policy issue but challenged by a number of obstacles and the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. This article argues that not only conventional policy approaches but also alternative approaches are needed in Asia to decouple socio-economic development and increases in environmental loads from people’s sense of well-being. To achieve human and planetary well-being under the situation of compressed development, four strategic courses of SCP policy are presented. These four courses are SCP policy expansion, enhanced linkage of consumption and production (CP), system transition and bottom-up approaches. Policy makers in Asia should keep these courses of action in mind and utilize opportunities, 13 of which are outlined here, to mainstream SCP. The 13 SCP opportunities, the key words of which include among others experience, genuine wealth, local design, digitalization, infrastructure, indigenous wisdom, collaboration and challenges, indicate entry points for Asian SCP policy development in the 2020s. Finally, based on these, the authors have devised an SCP case matrix and produced 43 example SCP cases for better application of the suggested SCP policy approach in the Asian region.