Health Resilience and the Recognition of Biological Risks
The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) Strategic Plan, adopted at the 46th ASEAN Summit in May 2025 as part of the ASEAN Community Vision 2045, provides an important framework for advancing regional cooperation on health security and biosecurity. While the Plan is not designed specifically as a biosecurity strategy, it reflects ASEAN’s broader commitment to build a resilient, inclusive, and people-centred community capable of responding to future crises and long-term transboundary challenges.

Strategic Goal 4 is particularly relevant, as it focuses on achieving a healthy ASEAN population through strengthened health systems, improved well-being, and protection against communicable and non-communicable diseases. It also emphasises prevention, preparedness and response capacities, including through the One Health approach, and the role of regional mechanisms such as the ASEAN Centre for Public Health Emergencies and Emerging Diseases (ACPHEED). In this regard, the Plan demonstrates that ASEAN has absorbed key lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the need for stronger regional coordination, surveillance, institutional preparedness and resilient healthcare architecture.

Strategic Goal 11 further reinforces this orientation by addressing the need for a more agile and resilient ASEAN Community in the face of emerging crises. Notably, it refers to strengthening health systems to prevent, prepare for, and respond to health-related hazards, while incorporating biosafety and biosecurity concerns. This marks a significant acknowledgement that biological risks are not limited to naturally occurring disease outbreaks, but also include broader concerns relating to safety, security, and preparedness in the management of biological hazards.

These provisions represent a positive development. They locate biosecurity within ASEAN’s wider socio-cultural agenda and recognise that biological risks have implications beyond the health sector alone.

Remaining Gaps: A Pandemic-Preparedness-Heavy Approach
Despite these strengths, the ASCC Strategic Plan remains largely shaped by the experience of pandemic preparedness and public health emergency response. However, biosecurity extends beyond pandemic preparedness. A comprehensive biosecurity agenda should also address dual-use research of concern, laboratory biosafety and biosecurity, biological data governance, synthetic biology, and the potential misuse of biological materials, technologies or knowledge.

A further limitation is the lack of explicit reference to the ASEAN Biosafety and Biosecurity Network, which was mentioned in the 2024 ASEAN Leaders’ Declaration on Strengthening Regional Biosafety and Biosecurity under Lao PDR’s chairmanship. The Declaration called for the establishment of this Network to facilitate knowledge-sharing, coordination and cooperation among ASEAN Member States, partners and relevant stakeholders. It also highlighted the importance of national legal frameworks, minimum standards, responsible and ethical research involving high-risk pathogens and toxins, protocols for storage and transport, sustainable human resources, and laboratory infrastructure.

The absence of a clear reference to this Network in the ASCC Strategic Plan represents a missed opportunity to connect ASEAN’s political commitments on biosafety and biosecurity with its long-term community-building agenda. This does not necessarily suggest that the Network has been deprioritised. However, it does indicate the need for stronger institutional continuity between ASEAN declarations, sectoral workplans and strategic community documents. Without such alignment, biosafety and biosecurity initiatives risk remaining fragmented, rather than being embedded within ASEAN’s
broader regional resilience architecture.

Moving Forward: From Preparedness to Comprehensive Biosecurity Governance
Moving forward, ASEAN should build on the ASCC Strategic Plan by broadening its treatment of biosecurity beyond pandemic preparedness. The Plan provides a useful foundation through its emphasis on One Health, resilient health systems, prevention, preparedness and response, and the recognition of chemical and biological hazards. However, its implementation should be linked more explicitly to existing ASEAN commitments, particularly the 2024 ASEAN Leaders’ Declaration on Strengthening Regional Biosafety and Biosecurity.

First, the ASEAN Biosafety and Biosecurity Network should be operationalised as a practical mechanism to support Strategic Goals 4 and 11. It could serve as a regional platform for technical exchange, capacity-building, training, legal and regulatory cooperation, laboratory standards, and the development
of common guidance on the safe and secure handling of biological materials.

Second, ASEAN should adopt a more comprehensive understanding of biosecurity that includes both response and prevention. Pandemic preparedness will remain essential, but effective biosecurity also requires preventing laboratory accidents, reducing the risk of misuse, strengthening oversight of high-risk research, and ensuring that advances in biotechnology are accompanied by appropriate governance mechanisms.

Third, ASEAN should ensure that biosecurity remains peoplecentred. Public communication, ethical reflection, community trust, and equitable access to capacity-building should be incorporated into regional biosecurity efforts. This is particularly important in Southeast Asia, where governance capacities, scientific infrastructure and quality of public health systems vary across Member States.

Overall, the ASCC Strategic Plan gives ASEAN a valuable foundation, but its real test will be whether commitments translate into coordinated action. A stronger biosecurity agenda must therefore move beyond preparing for the next outbreak to preventing biological risks before they become regional crises. For ASEAN, this is not only a health priority, but a measure of its readiness for an increasingly complex biological future.