International Good Practice Principles for Sustainable Infrastructure

Infrastructure: a key element to achieve the SDGs

Infrastructure underpins human and economic development and is linked to all 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), either directly or indirectly influencing the attainment of 92% of the 169 individual SDG targets.

Central to sustainable development, infrastructure underpins economic growth and delivers the services that are essential to improve livelihoods and well-being. At the same time, unsustainable, poorly planned and delivered infrastructure can have disastrous effects on the environment and societies.

As part of the implementation of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) Resolution 4/5 on Sustainable Infrastructure, the UN Environment Programme has released two publications to support countries in adopting integrated approaches to sustainable infrastructure, gathering information from consultation and inputs from experts and UN Member States.

10 guiding principles for policymakers

The International Good Practice Principles for Sustainable Infrastructure sets out ten guiding principles that policymakers can follow to help integrate sustainability into infrastructure planning, management, and delivery, creating the enabling environment for sustainable infrastructure that is needed to achieve the SDGs and the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement.

These principles offer a guide to how and why infrastructure planning and development should focus on the following key areas:

• Strategic Planning to ensure the alignment of infrastructure policies and decisions with global sustainable development agendas and to strengthen the enabling environment.
• Responsive, Resilient, and Flexible Service Provision to meet actual infrastructure needs, allow for changes and uncertainties over time, and promote synergies between infrastructure projects and systems.
• Comprehensive Lifecycle Assessment of Sustainability, including the cumulative impacts of multiple infrastructure systems on ecosystems and communities over their entire lifespans, to avoid “locking in” infrastructure projects and systems with various adverse effects.
• Avoiding Environmental Impacts of infrastructure systems and investing in natural infrastructure to make use of nature’s ability to provide essential, costeffective infrastructure services and provide multiple co-benefits for people and the planet.
• Resource Efficiency and Circularity to minimize infrastructure’s natural resource footprint, reduce emissions, waste and other pollutants, and increase the efficiency and affordability of services.
• Equity, Inclusiveness, and Empowerment through a balance between social and economic infrastructure investment to protect human rights and promote wellbeing, particularly of more vulnerable or marginalized groups.
• Enhancing Economic Benefits through employment generation and support for the local economy.
• Fiscal Sustainability and Innovative Financing to close the infrastructure investment gap within the context of increasingly constrained public budgets.
• Transparent, Inclusive, and Participatory Decision-Making that includes stakeholder analysis, ongoing public participation, and grievance mechanisms for all stakeholders.
• Evidence-Based Decision-Making that includes regular monitoring of infrastructure performance and impacts based on key performance indicators and the promotion of data sharing with all stakeholders

These ten principles can be used to support integrated, systems-level approaches that can increase governments’ abilities to meet a given level of service needs with less infrastructure that is more resource efficient, pollutes less, is more resilient, more cost effective and has fewer risks than “business-as-usual” approaches.

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Case studies for a broad implementation of these good practices

This report is complemented by a second publication, Integrated Approaches in Action: A Companion to the International Good Practice Principles for Sustainable Infrastructure, a selection of case studies that illustrate each of the ten guiding principles in order to make them easily adaptable and applicable to any specific national context.

This second study provide real-world examples of the good practices set out in the principles, through ten case studies with broad geographic representation, across sectors, covering diverse forms of infrastructure.

Together, the publications aim to inform the forthcoming wave of global infrastructure investment. Collectively, they specify and demonstrate how environmental, social and economic sustainability must be integrated right across infrastructure policy making at the systems level.

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