Business Doesn't Want Fewer Rules. It Wants Clear Ones.

 

Veolia's Jerome Le Borgne and JFCCT's Martin Venzky-Stalling say Thailand's real bottleneck is not money or technology but rules that arrive too late.

 

Two of the most consistent voices at the Nation Visionary Club Roundtable did not spend their time asking the government to go easier on business.

 

They asked for the opposite: rules clear and firm enough that companies acting in good faith are not punished for it.

 

Jerome Le Borgne of Veolia Environmental Services and Martin Venzky-Stalling, representing the Joint Foreign Chambers of Commerce in Thailand (JFCCT), returned to that theme across both panels of the roundtable, held under the banner "Sustainable Thailand — No Choice Left, Ready to Stay in the Game."

 

Between them, they built a case that Thailand's sustainability problem is now less about capital or technology than about the absence of a regulatory framework that businesses can actually plan against — with data centres as the clearest example of what happens when that framework doesn't exist.

 

 

 

"Environmental security is national security"

Le Borgne argued that Thailand needs to reclassify the entire policy category. Veolia, he noted, is the largest environmental services company in the world, operating across dozens of countries and cities, and has watched governments treat climate and environmental issues as a lower-tier concern relative to defence or macroeconomic policy.

 

"This isn't just climate adaptation; it's a matter of environmental security," he said. "And environmental security is national security — arguably it should be treated the same way as defence."

 

 

 

He grounded the point in water, which he called the first casualty of a changing climate "even in countries blessed with abundant water." He cited parts of Europe, including the UK, now facing what he termed "water bankruptcy" — consuming more than nature can replenish.

 

For Thailand's Eastern Economic Corridor, a coming super El Niño will force decisions about how to prioritise water between farming, manufacturing, petrochemicals and data centres — decisions, he argued, that need the kind of master planning currently reserved for strategic infrastructure.

 

His closing argument, repeated in both panels, was an appeal to the economics of delay.

 

"It will always be cheaper to act now than to act ten or twenty years from now," he said in the first session — and returned to the same point later with more urgency: "If we're not starting to talk about environmental security as a problem like national security, what's going to happen is that every crisis that happens in the world — with crisis, there will be others."

 

Asked where he would start, his answer was immediate: "I would start with water… it's the resource most primordial and the one on which society is built."

 

 

 

"Better to have tougher regulations with certainty"

Venzky-Stalling's starting position was equally blunt. JFCCT represents 31 chambers and roughly 8,000 companies, and its members' single biggest concern, he said, is not the toughness of Thai regulation but its unpredictability.

 

"It's actually better to have tougher regulations with certainty and clarity than the reverse," he said.

 

 

 

 

He pointed to the Clean Air Bill as the clearest case in point: some companies genuinely want to do the right thing, but if they act while competitors are not obliged to, they end up at a competitive disadvantage.

 

Clarity in law, he argued, does not constrain business — it enables it, creating space for new business models, products and services that would not otherwise get funded.

 

That is why JFCCT, alongside Weenarin Lulitanonda of the Thailand Clean Air Network, issued a public letter backing effective clean air legislation as it moved through Parliament.

 

The chamber's members, she noted, are aware that data put the GDP cost of clean air issues alone at 10 to 12 per cent — a figure that does not even account for climate impacts. Ineffective legislation, in other words, is bad for business, not merely bad for the environment.

 

Venzky-Stalling extended the same logic to governance more broadly. What determines, he asked, whether a company will still be honouring its sustainability commitments in three to five years?

 

"Good governance" — not a slogan applied for one earnings cycle, but board-level accountability that survives changes in market conditions. He also flagged a subtler cost of policy uncertainty: unintended consequences.

 

If the Eastern Economic Corridor faces worsening heatwaves and drought, he said, employers will face a workforce problem nobody planned for, because "your workforce lives in the community."

 

Sustainability, in his framing, cannot be confined to a company's own operations.

 

"Sustainability doesn't stop at the fence of your business," he said — citing tourism as an industry inseparable from the health of the destination it depends on.

 

 

 

Data centres: the test case for both arguments

Nowhere did the two speakers' concerns intersect more directly than on data centres and Thailand's AI-driven investment boom — a subject Le Borgne described in a single image.

 

"Data centres are two sides of the same coin," he said. "On one side, you have an asset that's hungry for water and power. On the other, you have an asset that transforms electricity into intelligence — intelligence that can then be used for good, including for sustainability elsewhere."

 

He placed Thailand roughly where Singapore, Malaysia and parts of the United States have already been and pointed to solutions Veolia has deployed elsewhere: a water recycling plant built with AWS in Mississippi to avoid drawing from rivers or groundwater, advanced cooling technology that sharply cuts water use, and heat recovery systems that redirect a data centre's waste heat to nearby manufacturing.

 

The core tension, he said, is a mismatch between the speed developers want — because speed captures market share — and the slower pace regulation requires to get sustainable outcomes right.

 

That mismatch is exactly what a moratorium, of the kind Malaysia has already imposed, is designed to correct.

 

He also flagged a problem still largely absent from the Thai policy conversation: the servers inside these data centres will reach end of life within five to seven years, leaving a wave of chips that are, in his words, "rich in valuable, non-ferrous minerals, but also hazardous."

 

Without compliant treatment infrastructure, he warned, that becomes a liability. With it, it becomes an opportunity to recover and reuse those minerals domestically.

 

Le Borgne's proposed policy lever was the direct power purchase agreement (PPA) — currently used mostly in solar, but, in his view, a proven tool for industrial decarbonisation that Thailand's framework already anticipates and should expand, including into bioenergy, which would carry direct benefits for agricultural communities.

 

 

 

Venzky-Stalling sharpened the risk from an industry-wide angle.

 

Thailand, he said, does not currently have enough green energy to go around, and if data centres absorb what limited supply exists, other industries under pressure to decarbonise will be squeezed out — a dynamic he termed a "green squeeze".

 

A more decentralised energy sector, he argued, would help.

 

He also pushed the discussion toward a question he felt was being skipped entirely: what is all this computing power actually being used for?

 

"What algorithms, what applications? Can we use AI in agriculture, in energy management, and in other sectors to make our economy more efficient and sustainable?"

 

That upside, he said, remains "the exciting… still underexplored" part of the conversation for Thailand.

 

 

Systems, not silos

By the closing session, both speakers had converged on a shared diagnosis: Thailand's institutions still treat environment, energy, water and social policy as separate boxes when the underlying problems refuse to stay in their lanes.

 

"From a systems thinking perspective," Venzky-Stalling said, "you can start with water or air, and you end up connecting the dots to reforestation, inequality and other things."

 

He wanted to see less incremental tinkering from business and more transformational change — companies rethinking their models rather than launching a product that merely saves a bit of plastic.

 

Taken together, the two men's contributions amount to a single argument delivered from two directions: business is not waiting to be told what to do, but it cannot act on uncertainty, and government delay is no longer a neutral position — it is itself a decision, and, on the evidence Le Borgne and Venzky-Stalling presented, an increasingly expensive one.