The crisis of humankind, the COVID-19 pandemic, brought the threats but the opportunities toward collaboration on disaster risk reduction (DRR) through public private partnership (PPP) over sustainable development goals (SDGs) at global landscape. Under the direct impact to the social-cultural, political and economic interests, we are in time for change. In the past decade, the concept of PPP has been widely applied to facilitate supply chain resilience after the 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquakes and Tsunami on business continuity planning (BCP). The highlight in 2019 is to implement PPP on climate extremes capacity building programme “Plant Back Better (PBB)” initiatives for Livelihood Continuity Planning (LCP) through the smart technology and climate-smart agriculture across the border for international collaborations. How to look out each other in distance will be the future challenge amidst COVID-19. Consolidating 10 years of implementation findings, this paper developed a cross-border PPP approach on utilizing smart technology for better governance on emergency preparedness and building a stronger partnership engagement on real-time basis. On the digital transformation era, this paper illustrated how we came across the barrier of language, cultural difference and border-control to deliver the DRR mission through PPP amidst the COVID-19 crisis on a common operational picture for emergency preparedness, response and recovery.