Bridging Climate Action and Sustainable Development: Advanced Assessment Tools for Global Infrastructure Projects, a KTH and UNOPS Collaboration

Climate action infrastructure projects (comprising mitigation and adaptation objectives) to achieve the Paris agreement have a wide range of synergies and trade-offs with the Sustainable Development Goals. However, stakeholders have limited access to the knowledge for mitigating those impacts, including on the impacts of relevant climate risks. This myopic approach means that siloed-planned climate action may cause a variety of detrimental tradeoffs, from social unrest or inequality to other environmental and economic issues. In response, KTH researchers have developed leading tools to assess the sustainability of infrastructure projects using detailed analysis of interlinkages between the characteristics of various types of energy and infrastructure projects and all social, economic and environmental targets of the SDGs.

Our project partner (United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS)) supports 2.3 billion USD/year of infrastructure projects in more than 80 countries and has similarly developed tools tailored to infrastructure project managers in various contexts around the world to ensure sustainability across project lifecycles. Within the scope of this proposed project, KTH and UNOPS will work together to shape and further develop these tools, improving them with years of rigorous academic research and analysis, and will test and make them available for implementation through thousands of project managers across the wider UNOPS community.