Foreword
This is a critical decade for efforts to tackle global climate change and make progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. The need to accelerate private investment in low-carbon and resilient critical infrastructure is more important than ever. To avoid sowing the seeds for future crises, we need to build back better and build back greener from the current combined health and economic crisis. An increasing focus on infrastructure development by both governments and institutional investors suggests there is growing momentum to scale up green infrastructure investment.
Capitalising on this momentum will require a nuanced understanding of the current landscape of institutional investment in infrastructure. To shed light on this landscape, this report provides a first-of-its-kind empirical mapping of institutional investors’ holdings in the infrastructure sector. The report’s quantitative analysis anchors expectations on the potential of institutional investment in infrastructure, and provides a baseline to track and measure progress. Based on these findings, the report’s qualitative analysis in chapter 3 outlines key levers and policy priorities to scale-up institutional investment in green infrastructure.
Although the potential for institutional investment in infrastructure has long been recognised, data on current investment is fragmented and incomplete. This report endeavours to inform policymaking by plugging information gaps on investment behaviour. The report combines and harmonises commercial data with desk research and rigorous econometric techniques. The resulting dataset allows a detailed, evidence-based understanding of the differences in investment behaviour between types of investors and pinpoints policy actions -- tailored to reflect existing investment patterns and preferences -- to scale up and shift institutional investment in green infrastructure.
Developed by the OECD Secretariat for the Working Party on Climate Investment and Development of the Environmental Policy Committee, this report builds on the OECD’s extensive body of work on the subject. The dataset and investment insights from this report complement the Directorate’s work stream on Approaches to Mobilising Institutional Investment in Sustainable Infrastructure. These new insights provide critical input to ongoing work across the organisation on mobilising private investment in low-carbon, resilient infrastructure as well as on the shifting landscape of institutional investment in infrastructure.
This report aims to lay the groundwork for further OECD work on upscaling investment in green infrastructure. Future OECD research could update data in this report to measure progress, provide new insights and facilitate dynamic evidence-based policymaking.
Rodolfo Lacy, Director, Environment Directorate.
