The types of infrastructure that countries develop play a critical role in enabling the shift to sustainable, resilient, and inclusive economies by delivering essential social and economic services and enabling sustainable patterns of consumption and production. To make a positive impact on global development targets like the SDGs, Paris Agreement, and the Global Biodiversity Framework, the trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment projected over the coming decade must be channeled into low-carbon, resource efficient, inclusive, and nature-positive infrastructure projects.
Sustainable Infrastructure Partnership
Since 2018, UNEP’s Sustainable Infrastructure Investment (SII) Team and its partners have been supporting countries to develop sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems that deliver on both development and sustainability objectives. This is done through integrated approaches that go beyond project-level safeguards that seek to “do no harm”, and instead build sustainability, resilience, and inclusiveness into infrastructure planning processes at the upstream level to help ensure that in addition to simply “doing projects right”, countries are “doing the right projects”.
The challenge of “doing the right projects” has two sides. The first is to plan and develop bankable sustainable and resilient infrastructure projects that optimize synergies and trade-offs between the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainability across the infrastructure lifecycle.
The second side of the challenge is to mobilize investment into these types of projects, and here public finance plays a key role. While private sector investment and technical expertise are increasingly needed to help close the infrastructure gap, especially in developing countries, the public sector still accounts for most infrastructure investment. Yet, public budgets are often misaligned with sustainable infrastructure objectives, resulting in underinvestment in sustainable projects. To address this imbalance, UNEP also works with governments to better align public infrastructure spending with sustainable development objectives and create the policy conditions to incentivize and enable increased private finance and investment for sustainable infrastructure.
During the fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA), which met in Nairobi in 2022, Members States adopted a resolution on Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure (UNEA/E.A.5/L.15). This new resolution builds on a 2019 UNEA resolution (UNEP/EA.4/L.5) by encouraging Member States to:
- implement the International Good Practice Principles for Sustainable Infrastructure;
- promote investment in sustainable and resilient infrastructure, natural infrastructure, and nature-based solutions;
- cooperate internationally to strengthen frameworks, including for financing;
- provide opportunities for engaging relevant stakeholders.
Knowledge resources
- International Good Practice Principles for Sustainable Infrastructure
- Decent Work in Nature-based Solutions 2024
- Nature-Based infrastructure Report
- Digital Public Infrastructure for Environmental Sustainability
- Ghana: Roadmap for Resilient Infrastructure in a Changing Climate
- Global assessment of impacts from planned major transport infrastructure development
- Sustainable Infrastructure Tool Navigator
- Infrastructure for Climate Action
- Sustainable Infrastructure case studies
- UNEP-Enabling Better Infrastructure programme webinars 2024 and 2023
- Webinar series “Sustainable Infrastructure: Putting Principles into Practice”-Policy briefs on sustainable infrastructure and Green Recovery, Circular Economy, Public Procurement
- UN EMG Nexus Dialogue 2022 and 2019
Activities
- Infrastructure Sustainability Learning (ISLe) Initiative
- “EnABLE” assessments
- Global assessment of impacts from transport infrastructure. Global Environment Facility project
- Digital Public Infrastructure for Environmental Sustainability
- Country support with technical assistance in Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Thailand, Rwanda, Mongolia, and Ghana.
- Regional support with technical assistance in Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean
- UN EMG Consultative Process on Sustainable Infrastructure
