infrastructure that support the productivity and well-being of all citizens. This high-level opening will examine how countries are aligning their infrastructure investment plans with a green and sustainability agenda, the steps necessary to engage all infrastructure actors, and ensure linkages to global initiatives to promote quality and sustainable infrastructure.

Ensuring that infrastructure supports the green transition begins with the infrastructure planning process. This includes linking infrastructure, regional development and sector plans to national climate commitments; and laying out the pathways for infrastructure investment to enable economy- and society-wide shifts in transportation and energy production and consumption. Such ambitious efforts are required to meet countries’ Net Zero Emission commitments, and will require close coordination and collaboration across sectors and sub-national governments, with centres of government, ministries of environment, finance and foreign affairs, and with infrastructure planning and coordination bodies. Beyond this, early and meaningful public participation processes will also be crucial, as stakeholders must adjust to a changing world. This will require governments to present compelling cases for why new types of infrastructure -- that will change how people live and travel -- are needed, and the methodologies to measure impact over the life of the infrastructure asset. This session will focus on the practical steps that countries and regions are taking to ensure that infrastructure investment is a core part of the green transition.

The G20 Quality Infrastructure Investment (QII) Principles provide strategic direction for raising the economic efficiency of infrastructure assets over their life-span, while integrating social and environmental considerations, including building resilience. The Principles build on a global consensus that infrastructure is a significant driver of economic prosperity, and that well-built and sustainable infrastructure maximizes the positive impacts of infrastructure investments for all. Implementing the Principles requires concrete improvements in the planning, financing, and delivery of infrastructure, while maintaining a big picture view. Beyond ensuring the integrity of infrastructure decision making – a key QII pillar – infrastructure governance serves to maintain focus on overall needs and objectives across diverse sectors and levels of government in order to maintain a credible pipeline of well-managed infrastructure projects that can attract sustainable investment. The session will look at strategies and steps to implement the QII Principles at national and sub-national levels including measuring the economic, social, environmental, and development dimensions for project reporting and accountability, and for developing evidence on what works to inform strategic infrastructure decision making, e.g. project prioritisation, selection and investment to ensure a pipeline of quality infrastructure projects. Innovative solutions, like the Blue Dot Network, can serve to operationalise the high-level principles at the project level, promoting investment into quality infrastructure projects.

Ever more intensive climate related extreme events have increased the urgency to strengthen climate resilience in infrastructure. Governments have a crucial role to play in building infrastructure resilience by providing an enabling environment for relevant stakeholders to work together; standardising methodologies to take resilience failures into account across the lifecycle of an asset; providing access to climate risk information to identify likely exposure and the infrastructure vulnerabilities; and building awareness and communicating existing and future risks. This session will look at government efforts to build resilience, including setting the right incentives for investing in infrastructure resilience and for taking up insurance, where this is useful and efficient.

The green transition will require new skills and capabilities in infrastructure planning and delivery, including decision-making and prioritisation at the project level, and project and PPP preparation and tender drafting that clearly capture government expectations and objectives. New skills are also required to deliver innovative new infrastructure such as renewable electricity generation. These could involve advanced asset management techniques and adopting new technologies that enable countries to reduce embodied emissions from infrastructure by prolonging the lives of existing assets. This could also require as well as financial skills such as selecting the most appropriate financing mechanism for the needs of each infrastructure project, creating financial incentives to maintain assets, and measuring and reporting ESG results to sustainable investors. To ensure infrastructure is part of a decarbonised future, it is crucial that government build and retain necessary capacity and knowledge to deliver high levels of service while also meeting emissions reduction targets.

Despite Russia’s large-scale and ongoing aggression, Ukraine is working hard to re-establish or maintain key services and to ensure the reconstruction and maintenance of critical infrastructure. It can also take steps now to improve its capacity to prioritise, target, and coordinate infrastructure investments for the country’s reconstruction once the war ends. Given the scale of ambition of the Ukraine Recovery Plan, strategic infrastructure plans, e.g. sectoral, regional, and local masterplans, will help provide a basis for prioritisation and selection of infrastructure projects, based on an overview of needs, a vision of national and local economic development, and shared values with European and OECD countries, including a green, sustainable and inclusive future. This session will look at what lessons can be drawn for Ukraine reconstruction from the experiences of OECD countries, which have suffered nationwide disasters in the past and have updated their contingency plans for the future. It will look at what evidence, data and expertise is required to inform strategic decision-making, the current work that the OECD is doing with Ukraine to support the reconstruction, and the possible role of OECD members to support reconstruction efforts.

A summary of the day’s key messages and an overview of the day ahead.

Strategic procurement – and particularly Green Public Procurement (GPP) – is increasingly recognised as a systemic tool to support the green transition given its share of economic activity (12% of GDP on average). GPP plays a key role in the delivery of sustainable infrastructure by enabling the purchase of greener goods and services – for example in the construction industry – and by supporting more strategic approaches to tendering and concessions that take long-term sustainability objectives into account. GPP is also a major driver for innovation, providing industry with incentives for developing environmentally-friendly works, products and services, particularly in sectors where public purchasers represent a large share of the market, such as construction, health services or public transport. This session will hear from speakers from leading countries and institutions on how they are moving to the public purchasing of products and services which are less environmentally damaging, taking into account their entire life cycle, and how new approaches in green and strategic procurement are supporting the delivery of sustainable infrastructure and greener outcomes, while continuing to ensure value for money and probity of procurement processes.

The long-term goal of a green transition has been met with short-term crosswinds of recent cost inflation, particularly in the energy and construction sectors, which poses new risks and uncertainties for infrastructure providers and central procurement bodies. This session dives deeper into how procurement strategies can respond to these challenges, while continuing to drive and incentivise a green transition. Leading infrastructure providers will give their on-the-ground perspective on how public purchasers and private contractors can better manage rising costs, and how green construction guidelines and life cycle costing methodologies can help identify and measure emissions and environmental impacts across an asset’s life. The session will also discuss how the procurement of reusable resources, such as through a circular economy, can help remove embodied emissions entirely.

In April 2021, the United States and Canada launched a new global effort — the Greening Government Initiative (GGI) — to engage and support governments around the world in greening national government operations. This first-of-its-kind international community of practice will enable countries to share knowledge and lessons learned, promote innovation, and help meet Paris Agreement commitments. The Greening Government Initiative serves as a platform for country representatives to share information and best practices, showcase innovation and success, and develop collaborative relationships with one another to accelerate national efforts to green national government operations and build climate resilience in the public sector. In many countries, the government is the largest real estate holder, fleet owner, electricity consumer, and purchaser of goods and services. Decarbonisation of government operations not only has direct emissions impacts, but also sends demand signals that can spur economy-wide actions, drive zero-carbon technologies and markets, lower decarbonisation costs, and demonstrate leadership by example. This session, which will feature speakers from the GGI, will discuss infrastructure’s role in the Initiative in more detail.

Governments are seeking to mobilise finance for sustainable infrastructure to sustain economic growth and reach development objectives. The OECD, through its Task Force on Institutional Investors and Long-term Financing, has been leading the policy dialogue on institutional investor and capital market participation in infrastructure investment, gathering statistics on investment levels, institutional investor preferences, and researching financial instruments and risk mitigation instruments, helping to facilitate investment by better describing sustainable infrastructure as an asset class. Financing work has important linkages to sustainability elements of infrastructure, especially as investors apply long-term risk/return analysis frameworks. This session will present leading best practice frameworks for sustainable infrastructure investment, financial structuring and innovative financing arrangements at various levels of government.

Delivering on the green transition will require the combined efforts of all infrastructure actors – both public and private. While countries are improving the coherence of their infrastructure planning within government to achieve sustainability objectives, new stakeholders – from the private sector to sub-national governments and non-governmental organisations – bring additional perspectives such as the pressing need to strengthen infrastructure resilience or to look at the biodiversity impact of infrastructure decisions. How can these actors be brought in early enough into infrastructure planning processes to develop a shared vision for sustainable infrastructure? The session will look at the types of leadership and partnership that are required to deliver on the green transition, for example by incorporating evidence on infrastructure impacts into infrastructure planning and financing, or by standardising reporting and accountability to help scale up sustainable infrastructure investment to support the climate transition?

A summary of both days of the Forum.