The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is reshaping energy, governance and inequality across Asia and the Pacific. This three-part series examines the very different long and short term impacts across the region.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed a tremendous vulnerability of the Asia-Pacific: in 2024, the region received 84 per cent of the oil shipped through the strait and 83 per cent of its liquefied natural gas. But, while dramatic, these raw numbers are an inadequate lens for understanding what this crisis is actually doing to the countries of the region.

The disruption is transmitted via the political and economic architecture through which food reaches markets, fertiliser reaches farms, electricity reaches households, aircraft reach destinations and the remittances of an estimated 30 million Asian migrant workers in the Gulf reach their families.

And it involves not a single, uniform vulnerability. It is a rough spectrum that runs from Malaysia - a net oil producer, who nevertheless has to import oil for domestic consumption - to Myanmar, which is managing a fuel crisis on top of a civil war, and Pacific Island states that are extremely oil dependent and have limited reserves. Between those poles sits a variety of levels of exposure, response capacity and likely trajectories out of the crisis.

In this three part series, we examine some of the similarities and differences as well as the implications for the region as a whole.

On 10 March, only 10 days after oil-tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was severely curtailed, Rashid Ahmed, a forty-two-year-old delivery rider in Dhaka, Bangladesh, tried three times before dawn to fill the tank of his motorcycle. Each time, the queues were too long, stretching around the block, and in the end he gave up. Stories like this played out across the region, from Sri Lanka to Pakistan to Cambodia.

In Sri Lanka, millions of people attempted simultaneously to register for the new petrol rationing system on 15 March. In Pacific Island communities, daily power blackouts have lengthened and people began missing medical appointments because transport costs made clinics........

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