The value of sustainable infrastructure
Infrastructure projects create value through improved connectivity, providing access to education and job opportunities, enhancing connections to healthcare and social inclusion. The development of mass transit systems, versus private vehicle ownership, provides more conscious choices in travel. Enhancements to surface water management through sustainable drainage inclusion manages flood risk and reduces peak demand on our water management systems. While the value these projects provide to society is evident and well understood, infrastructure projects are usually resource-heavy, requiring impactful delivery periods and disruption while integrating into the existing environment.
The core principle of sustainability is to create intergenerational equity; it’s not just about current resource efficiency but about preserving future capabilities and options. We traditionally consider the three pillars of environmental, economic, and societal and then translate these into sustainable aspects of infrastructure projects. It is estimated that the Built Environment is responsible for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions [1]. While this value is not necessarily alarming, due to the vast nature of the sector and the human-centered focus, it highlights that our efforts to drive sustainable change should have a strong focus within the Built Environment and associated infrastructure projects.
Sustainable decision-making in infrastructure
For those work in the Built Environment industry, it is key for us to robustly challenge the impacts of our current decisions on the future. When we build a bridge or road now using certain materials and methods, how does that affect future communities’ ability to build their own infrastructure? If we deplete rare earth metals for current technology installations, what alternatives will be available for future generations? This requires us to consider the investment of resources in the same manner as investment of financial capital into our infrastructure projects. If we invest our resources at this stage, is it a good return on the impact of CO2-eq, and is the resource readily available?
Within infrastructure projects, the impact starts from robust and explicit requirement definition, which needs to have holistic stakeholder input. The Infrastructure Carbon Review in 2013 [2] outlines a solid framework on how to approach this with the principles of build nothing, build less, build clever, and build collaboratively.
While this has been applied to progression through the project lifecycle historically, these principles should be considered collectively within the earliest stages of the project, challenging them against the requirements and having them tied into the feasibility assessment to ensure accountability within the infancy of infrastructure projects.
Strategic sustainability in project and portfolio management
We also need to assess if there is value in increasing our investment at the point of delivery. The discrete period of delivery is often intensive in resource use; investing more at this point can provide value through both future-proofing or passive provision so that the impact of future upgrades or enhancements is more limited. From a portfolio perspective, this means balancing the needs of now with the protection of resources for the future. This is highly relatable in the renewals area where infrastructure managers have large asset banks, which need careful resource planning to deliver workstreams to ensure that the infrastructure has reliability, availability, and maintainability to deliver the expected outcomes.
Traditionally, portfolio management has focused on economic sustainability, managing finite finances within set financial planning periods. Integrating the environmental element into these decisions requires the ability to understand and analyse the impact of material resource choice. While steps are being made with initiatives such as material passporting and carbon reporting, this needs to be further driven by industry to allow for trusted metrics to compare and assess.
Within projects, we see assessment of options at feasibility which ultimately decide the investment in the solution. At this stage, we are seeing the industry moving towards defining what the minimum viable product is – the solution which satisfies the defined requirements with a focus on eliminating wasted resources on producing anything over and above. While the minimum viable product is a great criterion to drive savings in the present, it must have a critical view on the delivery of future capacity, capability, or passive provisions to support the future at a balanced cost.
Strategic and sustainable portfolio management comes from the balancing of resources, to provide both the deliverables and benefits to the present, but to manage the investment of resources over time to harness their potential in the most effective way. Data-driven decisions are required to be able to act with the best intentions to achieve this requirement to drive sustainability within infrastructure projects. The field of Artificial Intelligence offers great potential in this sector to provide more interconnected analysis and decision tools. This will allow us to use our resources in the most effective way with consideration of not just the impact now but on future generations to achieve intergenerational equity.
[1] McKinsey Sustainability – Building value by decarbonizing the built environment – June 2023
[2] HM Treasury – Infrastructure Carbon Review – 2013
