Driving sustainable development through better infrastructure: Key elements of a transformation program

Paper produced with The Brookings Institute and The New Climate Economy

The U.N. Conference on Financing for Development at Addis Ababa provides a historic opportunity to reach consensus on a new global compact on sustainable infrastructure. To this end, the paper proposes six critical areas for action:

• First, there is a need for national authorities to clearly articulate their development strategies on sustainable infrastructure.
• Second, the G-20 can play an important leadership role in taking the actions needed to bridge the infrastructure gap and in incorporating climate risk and sustainable development factors more explicitly in infrastructure development strategies.
• Third, the capacity of development banks to invest in infrastructure and agricultural productivity needs to be substantially augmented in order for them to pioneer and support changes needed for better infrastructure
• Fourth, central banks and financial regulators could take further steps to support the redeployment of private investment capital from high- to low-carbon, better infrastructure.
• Fifth, the official community (G-20, OECD, and other relevant institutions) working with institutional investors could lay out the set of policy, regulatory, and other actions needed to increase their infrastructure asset holdings from $3-4 trillion to $10-15 trillion over the next 15 years.
• Sixth, over the coming year the international community should agree on the amounts of concessional financing needed to meet the SDGs, how to mobilize this financing and how best to deploy it to support the economic, social, and environmental goals embodied in the SDGs.