10 August 2026

Growth Without the Cost: Inside Thailand’s Green Economy Turn

Thailand’s rapid growth over recent decades came at a steep environmental price: shrinking forests, depleted soils, and mounting plastic, air and water pollution, climate disasters. The country is now working to change that equation and to keep climbing toward high-income status over the next two decades without spending down the natural capital its economy relies on. Much of the policy foundation for that shift is already in place: Thailand’s Bio-Circular-Green (BCG) Economy Model, its long-term National Strategy, 13^th National Economic and Social Development Plan and a draft Climate Change Act — now moving through the legislative process and set to establish the country’s first national framework for carbon pricing, emission cuts, and carbon revenue recycling — all pull in the same direction. But frameworks on paper only go so far. The harder work is turning them into functioning carbon markets, cleaner industries, and farms that produce more while wasting less.

That is where PAGE comes in. A partner to Thailand since 2019, PAGE supports the country at several points along this path. The past three months offer a useful snapshot. Three recent activities from different PAGE workstreams in the country show a transition moving from ambition into practice: a policy exchange with a regional neighbour, a round of training for the agriculture sector, and a consultation on the rules of a future carbon market and industry’s green transition.

Learning from a Neighbour: The Indonesia–Thailand Policy Exchange

In late April, PAGE, through UNIDO, hosted a three-day South–South exchange that brought planners from Indonesia’s Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) to Thailand. The premise was straightforward: the two countries are at different but complementary stages of the same journey. Indonesia has run a mandatory Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for its power sector since 2023 and can speak to the practicalities of scaling carbon markets, while Thailand offers tested models for putting green policy into practice, from its B MARK biodiversity certification to its tiered Green Industry standards and eco-industrial estates.

Officials on both sides benefited from peer learning and left with concrete ideas to adapt at home, and with a clearer sense of where the two countries can work together — on carbon markets, industrial symbiosis, and biodiversity-linked value chains — as Asean neighbours facing many of the same challenges.

Preparing Industry for a Low-Carbon Future

A carbon market only works if the industries inside it are ready for it. So alongside training officials to design the system, PAGE — through UNIDO and in partnership with the National Economic and Social Development Council (NESDC) — began building a Green Industry Transition (GIT) Roadmap to help Thai industry prepare for a low-carbon future. Over May and June, a series of four national workshops, run by KPMG Thailand, brought government, industry associations, financial institutions and technical experts around the same table, working through everything from low-carbon technology and finance to competitiveness and a just transition for workers.

The roadmap that came out of it is mapping decarbonization pathways, financing options and domestic carbon-credit opportunities across ten priority industrial sectors: the ones that will feel Thailand’s future ETS first. The aim is straightforward: give businesses, from energy-intensive heavy industry to SMEs, a way to meet coming carbon-pricing rules without losing their competitive footing, so the move to cleaner industry stays both resilient and fair.

Taking the BCG Model to the Field: Training of Trainers in Agriculture

In July, PAGE support moved to the training room. Together with UNIDO and the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, PAGE backed a Training of Trainers programme on the Bio-Circular-Green Economy in agriculture: three intensive three-day workshops held across three provinces, each gathering around 100 participants in person and up to 500 online. The trainees, including extension officers, agricultural trainers, programme managers and policy-support staff, worked through eight modules spanning BCG foundations, smart agribusiness and digital farming, finance, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

These participants will now carry BCG principles to the people who apply them daily: farmers, cooperatives and community enterprises. And the programme keeps working after the workshops end: participants are now connected through an online learning platform for follow-up coaching, and the recorded sessions are available as self-paced online courses, extending the training’s reach well beyond the initial 300 in-person participants.

Sharpening the Carbon Pricing Toolkit

On 31 July, PAGE brought stakeholders together online for a consultation on Thailand’s proposed ETS Framework and Roadmap. It was a chance to pressure-test how the country’s first carbon market will work and to sequence its rollout as the Climate Change Act advances. A panel drew the wider effort together, from cushioning socio-economic impacts and protecting workers through a just transition to the online and in-person training that has built up officials’ expertise along the way.

That breadth is the point: peer learning, like the Indonesia exchange, was only ever one part of it. Over the past year, five PAGE agencies have each played to their strengths in support of Thailand’s ETS: UNIDO shaping the framework and readying industry, UNDP weighing the economic trade-offs, ILO safeguarding a just transition, UNITAR building officials’ technical capacity, and UNEP advising on what makes a carbon market credible. Few single organisations could cover that much ground, and together they are helping Thailand turn carbon-pricing ambition into a system it can actually run.

One Transition, Many Fronts

PAGE is working alongside Thailand to help it achieve its ambitious goals: high-income status and economic growth that protects rather than depletes its natural capital, anchored in reliable models and frameworks. Delivering on it takes progress on many fronts — carbon markets that work, industries that run cleaner, and farmers able to produce more sustainably. By backing that work where it counts, PAGE is helping Thailand turn a national vision into results, on its own terms.

For more on PAGE’s work in Thailand, visit the PAGE Thailand country page.