Apocalypse Now, Redux
Coming Soon…
“In stable times, sustainability may be seen as a long term aspiration,” says Tin Shine Aung, a Burmese scholar and sustainability expert whose work bridges research, policy, and on-the-ground crisis response. “But in our context, in the context of a polycrisis, it’s become like a strategy for survival and reconstruction.”
The Consulting Director of the Shwe Taung Tan Research Initiative Center, Tin Shine Aung is also currently pursuing a PhD in sustainability science, focusing on the intersection of governance, climate resilience, and social equity in fragile states. Through the Sustainability Lab at SRIc, he leads Myanmar’s first sustainability-focused online publication, The Sabai Times, which provides in-depth coverage of the country’s environmental, social, economic, and governance issues. Over the past decade, he has written extensively on Myanmar’s overlapping political, environmental, and humanitarian emergencies. His perspective blends academic rigor with lived experience of Myanmar’s breakdown, making him a leading voice on why sustainability must be seen not as a luxury but as a survival strategy.
Tin Shine Aung situates Myanmar in a concept that has moved from the margins of academia into the center of today's crisis-related vocabulary: the “polycrisis.” This emphasis is reflected in title of his influential article, “A Violence–Climate Emergency Nexus in the Myanmar Polycrisis,” published last year. Drawing on scholars who popularized the term, but simplifying it for a general audience, he wrote that Myanmar’s present reality is what happens when political, environmental, economic, and social emergencies stop being separate events and begin to drive one another. As he explains, “Polycrisis is not like two plus two [equals four].” Instead, its effects can multiply exponentially.
The concept of “sustainability” is also critical here: The classic definition of sustainable development is described in the report issued by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, which is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Tin Shine Aung says that since then, as the field has grown, it is generally accepted that sustainability is not just an environmental consideration, but rests on three pillars equally: economic and social as well as environmental. It must also be underpinned by responsive governance, one that is inclusive, listens, and adapts when growth models harms social sustainability, such as such as over-tourism.
Based on this foundation, Tin Shine Aung emphasizes the importance of not just thinking in terms of sustainability when things are going well. Sustainability in his telling is not a post-recovery luxury, it is something that needs focus when conditions are not ideal. To illustrate his point, he says wryly that climate shocks won’t pause out of courtesy to politics. “Disaster would not say, like, Okay…let’s [skip] Myanmar and go to other countries.” He says the same argument can be made about social and economic collapse. That’s why, when challenged on timing, he is unequivocal that the issue cannot be put aside even in the middle of a raging conflict. But what is more, he goes on to note that sustainability should be strategy for survival and reconstruction, and that without embedding sustainability’s principles now, Myanmar may not endure long enough to even reach a future transition.
To square his perspective on what successful sustainability requires with the present situation in Myanmar, Tin Shine Aung takes a step back and threads a historical line to the present. He notes that while the country has endured many traumas since independence, 2007 was a tipping point. Fuel-price hikes and the move of the capitol to Naypyidaw triggered mass hardship, which helped give rise to the Saffron Revolution, when monks took to the streets and the regime answered with force. In other words, that period exposed structural cracks in governance and justice that widened in the 2010s, laying groundwork for today’s fully interacting crises. Along with that, there was the catastrophic 2008 Category 4 cyclone, Nargis, that devastated the delta and killed well over 130,000 people, displacing and traumatizing many others— followed shortly thereafter by the regime pushing ahead with a Constitutional referendum that solidified the military’s hold on government while claiming, incredibly, an approval vote of “over 90%” despite all the post-disaster chaos.
Tin Shine Aung goes on to say that even as the effective governance paradigm of successful sustainability was breaking apart, the social pillar was actively corroding as well. He describes how ethnoreligious nationalism gathered force in the early 2010s—such as 969 and, later, Ma Ba Tha—pushing hate speech and economic boycotts of Muslim-owned businesses, tolerated or tacitly abetted by political and religious elites. Even the democratic opposition adapted to this climate: Muslims were excluded from the NLD’s 2015 candidate lists, yielding the first Muslim-free legislature since independence! He stresses the shock of the 2017 assassination of the eminent Constitutional lawyer, U Ko Ni— a Muslim— who devised the work-around that allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to effectively lead the country by being State Counsellor in 2016, even though the 2008 Constitution barred her from the Presidency. To Tin Shine Aung, this event exposed the ugly intersection of power, nationalism, and religion, and he notes that, horrificly, the murder was celebrated by many Burmese online. Then later that same year, the “clearance e operations” in Rakhine pushed more than 700,000 Rohingya over the border, a social-system failure that also shattered international trust in Myanmar’s transition, culminating in cases at the ICJ and ICC.
The economic pillar has similarly been dissolving. Power cuts reduce factory electricity to somethings just two to three hours a day, forcing expensive generators and pushing SMEs to the brink; over a million workers have lost their jobs; household staples such as cooking oil have become luxuries as prices triple compared with pre-coup years. He notes also that sanctions targeting the junta ripple downward into everyday commerce. Moreover, new U.S. tariffs imposed by President Trump— 40% on certain categories of goods— are squeezing the garment sector, and conscription has drained labor from farms and workshops.
He also describes how the social pillar, in particular the health and education sectors, have also fallen apart. The coup triggered a mass walkout by doctors, nurses, teachers, and social-welfare workers through the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM). The moral logic of CDM is clear to him, but there are also consequences: a public-service collapse that hits the most vulnerable the hardest. This, he explains, is how one crisis multiplies into many, circling back to his theme of polycrisis.
Against this backdrop, he warns of a deeper moral unravelling. Monks once anchored public ethics through monastic schooling and everyday guidance, a role that shaped Burmese society long before the colonial period; but the military’s long project of infiltration—into education, bureaucracy, and the religious sphere—has corroded that compass. Once the generals inserted themselves into the Saṅgha’s ecosystem and amplified propaganda, social values twisted, and what some saw as harms limited to minorities spread into a broad erosion of integrity across the whole community. Ultra-nationalist currents, including Islamophobia, were tolerated or indirectly supported by political and religious elites, nurturing an environment of impunity and turning the moral authority of parts of the clergy toward exclusion rather than cohesion. The result, he argues, is that a pillar that should steady society in crisis has been compromised, weakening social sustainability exactly when it is most needed.
To further illustrate what makes Myanmar’s situation a polycrisis rather than “just” a war-torn breakdown, Tin Shine Aung contrasts it with Ukraine. He is careful not to compare suffering, but he points out that Ukraine’s systems have not totally broken down, and that many Ukrainians were afforded a structured, safe and systematic pathway to move across the border to EU and other countries for safety; in Myanmar, practically all systems have broken down, and there is no option for leaving the country available to most Burmese other than a fraught attempt at escape to a refugee camp. The shocks have accumulated faster than the society’s resilience has been able to keep up with them in Myanmar.
Tin Shine Aung then segues to discussing the Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan (MSDP). He describes it as “a blueprint or the footprint for us to go to more sustainable future,” spanning economy, climate, and social domains. Its genesis began in 2015, when the NLD won the election and inherited a patchwork of economic and development plans from the previous government. These were consolidated into a coherent program, which was launched with great promise as the MDSP in 2018. It was supposed to cover the period until 2030, but the coup put an end to it in 2021, another indicator of institutional backsliding.
There is, however, one silver living: Tin Shine Aung stresses that sustainability, in fact, is already being practiced at the grassroots, even without a functioning state and amid all the turmoil! Communities have established underground education systems and digital classrooms in liberated areas, created alternative universities, and improvised health services. With power cuts crippling the grid, families and local groups have turned to small-scale renewable energy to meet their daily needs. To some, these may look simply like acts of survival, but to Tin Shine Aung, they are also acts of vision that embody resilience and equity. They show that sustainability is not abstract theory but a lived necessity in Myanmar today.
But he stresses that grassroots action alone cannot carry the load. The international community needs to step up to identify, nurture and scale up these local initiatives; at the same time, however, they must be helped to understand how their choices can cascade. For example, sanctions aimed at elites should be paired with channels that keep lifesaving goods and locally led relief moving, or they will unintentionally deepen the multiplier effect at the bottom. Tariffs that punish the junta’s revenue streams should not be blind to the way they also crush women-dominated garment jobs unless accompanied by responsible purchasing, diversification, and labor-protection measures in the same communities. And because aid blockages are themselves a weapon, donors need contingency plans to be able to reach opposition-held areas during floods and storms; otherwise climate shocks will keep converting into man-made catastrophes.
In closing, Tin Shine Aung re-emphasizes the narrative he began with: the country’s crisis is not a set of separate problems to be solved sequentially, nor sustainability only something to take up when all is well. The system will not self-heal unless all three pillars are addressed simultaneously, and it must start now. He advocates rebuilding resilience, recentering inclusive governance, and protecting social cohesion from weaponized nationalism— that is, treating sustainability as the method for surviving the country’s polycrisis.
And again, he says it is already happening now, and that even amid war, the Burmese people are quietly laying the groundwork for that future, with underground classrooms, improvised digital universities, and household renewable energy. He pleads with the international community to help sustain these efforts and grow them into a more durable foundation once the fighting ends. “Even in the polycrisis,” he says, “our Burmese people are quietly laying the foundation for the sustainable future.”