Infrastructure is a fundamental human enterprise that we must get right or risk undermining biodiversity and sustainable development goals for decades to come.  It is time to rethink our infrastructure future and find a new path to an integrated approach that steers away from ecologically degrading norms and toward biodiversity-positive practices that meet humanity’s aspirations while helping restore a thriving planet.

In this session we will take a fresh look at this vital element of our economies and debate how best to achieve a nature-positive future.  This transition will require new voices, innovation, policy shifts, and the political will for change.  The highlight of the event will the experiences shared by community leaders, financiers, planners, engineers, and ecologists from Colombia, Kenya, Nepal, Mongolia, and other countries as they tell inspiring stories from both the public and private sectors about addressing this enormous challenge and encouraging a healthy local and global debate. 

Panelists will explore how to generate a nature-positive transition through practical strategies for mainstreaming biodiversity safeguards in infrastructure development. They will convey to the audience the critical importance of making sure we address the highly impactful infrastructure sector in the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.   

Why the increasing focus on infrastructure? Species and processes must be on the move to survive. Nature is about flexibility, permeability, adaptability, and flows, but infrastructure trends in the opposite direction – toward impermeability, inflexibility, and permanence. Once in place, we rarely take it back, solidifying its continued impacts on nature’s ebbs and flows for generations.  Yet, while 75% of the built infrastructure in 2050 does not even exist today, developing sustainable infrastructure now could help us reach 72% of SDG targets, both directly and indirectly.  We need infrastructure. There is no question about it. 

The issue is balance – harmony between the infrastructure services we need to flourish and the urgent task of restoring healthy and productive ecosystems.  A growing body of knowledge from around the world shows that securing natural infrastructure and applying ecologically sensitive and climate smart practices to every stage of the infrastructure life cycle – no matter the sector – can ensure that infrastructure contributes to biodiversity gains rather its decline.

Applying participatory and inclusive planning and safeguard practices starting at the earliest conceptualization phase through to financing, designing, operating, and decommissioning can dramatically avoid or minimize impacts as well as risks to the infrastructure itself, as described in the United Nations Environment Programme’s ‘International Good Practice Principles for Sustainable Infrastructure’. This local people-informed and science-based process provides opportunities to apply indigenous knowledge, new technologies and nature-based solutions that will reduce infrastructure’s impacts and have a positive effect on biodiversity. With 3,700 new dams and over 15 million miles of new roads planned for the next decade, where is it going to go?  What will it be made of?  With science showing us that 95% of Amazon deforestation occurs within 5 km of a road, for example, the time is now to drive a major transition in global norms toward realizing a fully sustainable infrastructure future.