Building Sustainable Infrastructure

Population growth and a global trend towards higher living standards have led to a massive expansion of infrastructure of various types, including transportation, energy supply, water and sewage systems, information and telecommunication, and waste management. These infrastructures are major users of environmental resources: they cover a substantial amount of space and utilise a significant share of the global raw material, energy and water demand, and may directly or indirectly contribute to the pollution of water, soil, and air. Maintaining, upgrading, and expanding infrastructures is an important need both in the Global North and the Global South, leading to a continuous demand for environmental resources. 

Doing this in a sustainable manner requires improving the resource efficiency of infrastructure across all sectors. A Resource Nexus approach can help ensure that this is done in consideration of an environmental systems science perspective, addressing both co-benefits between different resource-related objectives but also paying attention to potential trade-offs. Under a Nexus perspective, it is also necessary to consider interlinkages between different infrastructures. In an increasingly digital world, information and telecommunication technologies, for example, can help make transportation smarter and sometimes even replace it. At the same time, IT infrastructures themselves have rapidly emerged as major energy and resource users. In some cases, for example the water sector, Nature-Based Solutions have the potential to replace conventional, grey infrastructures.