Green Road to Kunming: Planning Environmentally Sustainable Infrastructure Workshop Series 2022

Environmentally sustainable and “green” infrastructure, including those applying nature-based solutions (NbS), are designed to deliver and/or protect a range of ecosystem services—such as water purification, air quality, space for recreation, and climate mitigation and adaptation—while avoiding or minimizing their impact on wildlife. Such infrastructure serves to support a green economy, reduce costs, create job opportunities, and enhance biodiversity. Sustainable infrastructure planning is a successfully tested tool that provides environmental, economic, and social benefits through natural solutions. In many cases, it can reduce dependence on “grey’ infrastructure that can be damaging to the environment and biodiversity, and can be more expensive to build and maintain. Sustainable Infrastructure upholds the G20 Principles for Quality Infrastructure Investment endorsed at the G20 Osaka Summit in 2019.

This series will demonstrate the multiple benefits—financial, economic, social, climate–related—of integrating green measures in infrastructure projects in the sectors of transport, energy, urban development and coastal development. The workshops are non-technical in nature, and designed primarily for government representatives, decision-makers, and stakeholders, in particular those attending the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Conference of Parties (COP15), which will reconvene in Kunming, the PRC, in the third quarter of 2022. The main objective of the COP 15 Conference is to finalize and adopt the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) which will guide urgent policy action at all levels to transform economic, social, and financial models, in order to stabilize biodiversity loss by 2030; and to allow the recovery of natural ecosystems, with net improvements, by 2050. Infrastructure development will play a fundamental role in achieving GBF targets, considering that Asia needs US$1.7 trillion in infrastructure investment to sustain growth and quality of life in the face of urbanization and climate change.