I have been passionate about the environment since I started working on a research and development team for ecology and marine resources 20 years ago. The research centre director was my environmental engineering Ph.D. supervisor and a great mentor. He told me many times that “the most valuable asset of any organisation is its soul: a shared purpose, built around an audacious goal and a set of common values.” His words made an immediate and significant impact on me.
As I head to COP28, the annual UN global climate conference, this sense of shared purpose and call to action still serves as my guide. As an environmental engineer working in the infrastructure sector, I have a responsibility to explain the critical role that infrastructure plays—both as a cause and as a solution for climate change.
Infrastructure is the physical fabric of our society. And it is more than just the things you can see, such as roads, bridges and the buildings that surround us. It is the outputs and outcomes that communities and economies depend on, from reliable power to affordable transportation to clean and safe drinking water.
But there is a catch. The negative environmental effects of infrastructure in the industrial age are cumulative and can no longer be ignored. Today, infrastructure is responsible for 79% of total greenhouse gas emissions and 88% of all adaptation costs, and it consumes 60% of all the world’s materials. Further, a new modeling study suggests that air pollution from using fossil fuels in industry, power generation, and transportation is killing 5 million people worldwide annually—nearly 10 people per minute. So, it is not an exaggeration to say that infrastructure defines our climate and will affect what happens next.
This year, COP28 marks the halfway point between when the Paris Agreement was established and its 2030 targets. The world is watching as climate leaders assess our progress toward reaching these goals. A new report from the United Nations says national climate plans are not on track to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In fact, the scenario of a disastrous global heating surpassing 2 degrees is very real, and it is currently set to rise more than 3 degrees.
So, there is intense pressure on infrastructure professionals. They are being asked to lead a monumental effort to decarbonise and climate-proof our infrastructure on a scale and pace never seen before. But the obstacles to these tasks are many, including a lack of engineers to perform this important work and challenges in aligning the necessary resources, which lead to cost and schedule overruns. As industries strive to reach ambitious net-zero emissions goals, optimising capital expenditure investments and accelerating project execution are crucial.
Despite these challenges, I remain optimistic. Looking at this from an engineer’s perspective, I see problems waiting to be solved with technology. By combining engineering data with sensor and other data, we can recreate physical infrastructure in the digital world (which we call infrastructure digital twins) and transform the conversation. We can leverage artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), modeling, simulation, and analysis to accelerate progress toward sustainability goals by anticipating, preventing, and adapting to climate risks.
One example is decarbonising existing infrastructure. By remotely monitoring existing assets—such as dams, bridges, water and electrical grids, district heating systems, or offshore wind platforms—with an infrastructure digital twin, engineers can reduce energy consumption or the frequency of physical inspections and maintenance and, thus, reduce the carbon footprint.
When building new infrastructure, decarbonisation and de-risking projects must be the priorities. With AI-powered digital twins, we can calculate and analyse the carbon and material footprint of any type of infrastructure asset in the design stage before it is even built, allowing engineers to optimise designs to ensure the lowest carbon and material outcome possible. Better information, and the ability to collaborate around it virtually, also helps reduce the risks of budget overruns and delays, a serious threat to hyperscale green capital projects that are critical to meet net-zero emissions targets.
Finally, we need to go beyond decarbonising and do a better job at adapting infrastructure to climate change effects, protecting people and saving our limited natural resources, such as water. The increased intensity, frequency, and duration of climate hazards—such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, and storms—are increasing risks for infrastructure, and stressing the natural resources. In 2022 alone, climate disasters caused nearly 32 million internal displacements worldwide—more than displacements due to armed conflict, and an increase of nearly 43% over the previous year’s levels. With digital twins, we can intelligently monitor natural systems, such as tree coverage to address urban heat islands, or anticipate structural problems in critical assets, such as detecting and preventing pipe leaks, to help increase resilience.
The magnitude of transformation required means that no organisation can do it alone.At COP28, governments, businesses, NGOs, and other leaders will need to embrace the role of technology in addressing our infrastructure challenges to meet sustainability goals. It is time to take bold steps and work together with a shared purpose to decarbonise the world and lead the way to a more sustainable, resilient and equitable future.
