The Certification Award Ceremony will celebrate the first infrastructure projects to have earned the Blue Dot certification for meeting the highest standards of sustainability and delivering positive economic, social, and environmental outcomes. This distinguished event highlights global leadership and innovation in responsible infrastructure development. The ceremony is open to all participants of the 2025 Conference on Infrastructure Governance.

Countries are faced with a growing infrastructure gap that needs to be addressed to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement by 2050. However, economic challenges, demographic changes, declining trust in governments and the advent of new technologies present new challenges to delivering the necessary pace and scale of new investment. This opening session sets out the reforms taking place across several countries, so they can be well-positioned to address these future challenges through infrastructure decision-making.

Significant new investment in infrastructure is needed for countries to reach the Paris Agreement and protect communities against climate change. But there are barriers to delivering the infrastructure at the pace and scale needed, such as financial constraints, permitting barriers, rising infrastructure costs and labour shortages. The interconnection between these issues requires them to be approached as one system. This session will explore these issues, including their interdependencies, to give policy makers an understanding of the initiatives they can deploy to unlock investment in green infrastructure.

Due to funding shortages, many countries cannot rely solely on new construction to bridge the infrastructure gap. Instead, they can enhance the efficiency of existing infrastructure through advanced asset management, demand management, and repurposing assets and land to reduce reliance on traditional infrastructure. This discussion will explore diverse non-built solutions that countries are implementing to deliver essential infrastructure services while addressing the climate challenge.

Trust between governments and citizens is declining at a time when challenges like climate change require governments to persuade citizens to make change for a greater good. For infrastructure, this means persuading citizens to interact with new infrastructure, such as wind farms and mass rapid transit, in new places. This discussion will set out how leading countries are using effective methods to engage citizens so they can deliver the infrastructure societies need at pace while also retaining the trust of citizens.

Countries must rapidly scale up resilient infrastructure to address growing risks, particularly those linked to climate change. Achieving this requires clear frameworks for how national and subnational governments, as well as landowners, can fairly share the costs of resilience. Equally important is ensuring policies discourage infrastructure development in high-risk areas. This session will examine policy settings that promote the equitable distribution of resilience costs. Given that resilience investments create both benefits and challenges for different groups, the discussion will also explore how countries can assess and balance the costs, impacts, and long-term advantages of resilient infrastructure.