Climate-resilient infrastructure: Getting the policies right (OECD, 2017)

This working paper is aiming at national policymakers in OECD countries to help them ensure that new and existing infrastructure is resilient to climate change. It covers transport, energy and water infrastructures, as they all share key common traits: they are capital-intensive, long-lived and interdependent across sectors. The paper provides recent experiences of governmental action in some OECD countries.

The paper identifies four priority areas for the action of national governments to support infrastructure resilience: (1) to support the provision of information and coordination within and between sectors, and in particular to ensure that key stakeholders (i.e. state-owned utilities, professional associations and regulators) have sufficient capacity to use climate projections; (2) to ensure that climate risks are appropriately accounted for in public sector investments, and transparently allocated between public and private partners in contractual agreements; (3) to align spatial planning policies, technical standards and economic policies and regulations in support of infrastructure resilience, and (4) to raise the profile of climate risk disclosure by relevant stakeholders, including financial ones, supporting initiatives for transparency.

The working paper stresses the need to undertake further efforts to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of governments’ actions, and to expand mutual learning between countries. The paper also points out to a few key remaining issues for action, concerning (1) the costs, benefits and effectiveness of policy and regulation levers, including spatial planning, (2) the analysis of PPP frameworks and contracts to understand their contribution to building resilience, and (3) the review of investment practices and climate risk screening tests by financial institutions.