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

Infrastructure projects for climate mitigation and adaptation have a wide range of synergies and trade-offs with the Sustainable Development Goals.

However, project managers and other stakeholders have limited access to the knowledge for mitigating those impacts, which require highly multidisciplinary science.

This myopic approach means that siloed-planned climate action may cause a variety of detrimental tradeoffs, from social unrest, inequality, distrust in the government as well as other environmental and economic issues.

In response, KTH researchers have developed leading tools to assess how climate mitigation-and adaptation-related infrastructure projects can be harmonized with the SDGs, using detailed analysis of interlinkages between the characteristics of various types of projects and all social, economic and environmental targets of the SDGs.The 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 also developed tools for infrastructure project managers 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 on the basis of years of rigorous academic research and analysis, with the objective to test and make those tools available for implementation through thousands of project managers across the wider UNOPS community.