Skip to main content

Policy Brief published on Making Infrastructure Resource Efficient

  • Published on December 7, 2019
The UN Environment Programme has published this policy brief to deliver a set of key messages around the critical need to decouple economic growth from the extraction and use of natural resources.

Natural resources are the foundations for our socio-economic systems. Over the past five decades, the global population has doubled, and the global output has grown fourfold, accompanied by the unprecedented extraction of natural resources,  While population growth rates appear to be abating, the socio-economic demands of a growing middle class suggest that our desire to extract finite resources shows no signs of slowing down. 

This economic growth has been characterized by rapid industrialization and urbanization and underpinned by large-scale infrastructure development. The development itself has been driven by linear economic models that follow a ‘take, make, dispose’ pathway. Under this predominant model, natural resources and material goods end their lifecycle as waste or emissions, with severe implications for the environment and human health.

There is now a critical need to decouple economic growth from the extraction and use of natural resources. Infrastructure development is particularly resource intensive, and in 2015 the construction sector alone accounted for half of the global material footprint. the resource efficiency of infrastructure can be a major driver of the transition to sustainable development.

Meeting the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development will require the international community to rethink how it plans, designs, builds, and operates infrastructure across all sectors.  The UN Environment Programme has published this policy brief to deliver a set of key messages around the critical need to decouple economic growth from the extraction and use of natural resources.

Download the full brief with its 10 key messages

Initiatives such as the Sustainable Buildings and Construction programme’s SHERPA project are cited as the type of innovative and disruptive technologies which foster more resource efficient practices and modes of social behaviour in response to changing infrastructure demands.

Unsplash - Andrew Neel

You might also be Interested in