The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented economic, environmental, and social change globally and hampered nations’ progress on meeting sustainable development path wherein climate responsiveness along with growth of every nation was a key indicator for progress. Uncertainty for businesses has also risen as a result of major loss of incomes, lower growth projections, restricted public expenditure budgets and supply chain bottlenecks. The heightened complexity of this global crisis is reflected in a wide range of vulnerabilities and opportunities that calls for an integrated systems approach to prevent solutions to one area causing unintended consequences elsewhere. There is also an urgent need for large-scale systems literacy to enable inclusive participation of at-risk populations and duty-bearers to deal with existing intractable problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, unplanned urbanization etc.

Asia, the largest and most populated continent, is a key stakeholder in the post-COVID-19 paradigm shift required to address these challenges. Opportunities in Asia come with their own set of challenges such as the diversity of social and political scenarios, transborder tensions, competition for natural resources, drastic climate change patterns, urban-rural divide, lack of infrastructure and supply chain accessibility issues. These are in addition to the universal challenges faced by the continent, or “wicked problems” as defined in the social planning literature, such as food security, water resource management, energy transitions, public health and environmental protection concerns.

In the post-COVID-19 context, there is growing consensus that integrated and inclusive sustainable development is the only way to avert environmental, economic and social disasters. Systems analysis is a powerful tool that can be used to find such integrated solutions and inform policy to maximize co-benefits and minimizes trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For the Asian region, potential areas of specific interest include agricultural sector development, urban systems management towards low or no-carbon cities, expanding new edge technologies, fossil fuel phaseout, and block chain technology. While big data analytics have long been billed as a solution space for enabling more agile, efficient, and evidence-based decision-making and to better measure progress, the capacity of small data analytics to fuel real-time decision making at a local level continues to remain a significant gap. Potential areas of interest in the region include the development of the agricultural sector, urban systems management in post-carbon cities, expanding new edge technology, growth initiatives that depend less on fossil fuel energy and more on block chain technology.