The Environment is a timely issue in the South East Asia region’s state of affairs. When the outbreak of Covid-19 started in January 2020 as to date, the attention on the global environment became limited because the issues on health were globally dominated and have been prioritized in global governance. Limiting the dialogue on mitigating the existing global environmental issues such as climate change during the pandemic has worsened the environment in the SEA region, hence a strong call from environmental advocates, academics, and green groups appealed for stronger policies and strategies for the global environment of ASEAN integration. There is a demand for a transition of a “new normal” and better research approaches on global environmental governance. Researchers and university academics in the region led action to abandon old normal ways in mitigating environmental issues and adopt a new, feasible, and better normal to deal during the pandemic. This paper discusses how ASEAN global governance anchored their actions to implement new normal research approaches for global environmental governance through their existing compliance on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and maximizing globalization with the use of advanced technology as the new and better normal for a greener and cleaner ecology. The ASEAN saw the opportunity that strengthening actions for global environmental governance through new normal research approaches would be a strong solution both in recovering from the global economy that the pandemic had weakened and for ASEAN to meet its goals for regional development. Emerging research also suggests a strong recognition to not only limit covid-19 researchers coming from the hard sciences but also recognize equally among the social sciences research since humans face both threats equally on health and environment that also affects the world economy which global governance plays a key role. In relation, this paper will argue using the manifestations of the green theory, a critical theory approach that analyzes environmental issues of international relations. Thus, a green theory supported the study’s analysis on ASEAN’s new and better normal response to redefine feasible strategies in mitigating environmental issues focusing on the role of the academics. The methodology used in this study is content analysis. Archival documents, news headlines, web content, and interviews from ASEAN and developmental institutions such as The World Bank and Asian Development Bank are collected and consolidated to analyze the results of this study. The findings revealed that the Covid-19 become a turning point for ASEAN countries to improve strategies on environmental governance, hence ASEAN’s academic relations for new and better normal research approach call for development. The role of the academics is anchored in the new and better normal research that has to be heard by policy-makers due to a sense of urgency, considering that hard science research is not enough since social science disciplines like political science would get on board to be architects of the policy-making to mitigate environmental issues amidst the Covid-19 in the region.