Infrastructure Sustainability and Regeneration

With a climate emergency all around us, the development and use of our infrastructure must move to a more sustainable footing.

Our clients in the infrastructure space are facing a number of pressing, interlinked challenges, which require a ‘whole system’ approach:

Carbon and Environment: In addition to ambitious decarbonisation targets and plans to achieve net zero, the circular economy approach is gaining traction. The built environment is increasingly focusing on resource circularity, waste reduction, and air and water quality improvements..

Nature and Biodiversity: There is growing recognition of the importance of protecting and enhancing natural capital and ecosystem services in infrastructure development. This includes considering the impact of major projects on nature and biodiversity.

Resilience and Adaptation: Climate change and extreme weather events are driving the need for infrastructure and buildings that are resilient and adaptable to changing conditions. This includes designing infrastructure to withstand natural disasters and incorporating features that can help communities adapt to changing climate patterns.

Social Value: Organisations are increasingly focused on creating positive social impact through their infrastructure projects. This includes addressing issues such as modern slavery, affordable housing, community engagement, and equitable employment.

Central, regional and local governments, infrastructure investors, asset owners, real estate owners, material suppliers and contractors.

Drawing on our deep sector experience, we bring practical experience of how to translate regulatory requirements and public commitments into impactful action. We help clients develop solutions that meet their sustainability ambitions and deliver meaningful contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

We help clients articulate their sustainability strategy and identify tangible ways of delivering on their sustainability ambition through their business model and processes. We define targets and implementation plans for products, services and functions.

This includes tech-enabled solutions for the integration of ESG requirements into strategy and project, programme and portfolio management. We also advise on procurement strategy – creating a systematic approach to ensure products, services and materials that are purchased align with sustainability goals.

We also support clients in identifying sustainable finance sources for their projects; to develop tools to evaluate and measure the impact of social value strategies; and to develop sophisticated ESG data and reporting that is fully integrated, assured and SDG-aligned.

We also support our clients around emerging sub-segments of sustainability that are of growing importance:

• Nature and Biodiversity - Helping clients understand nature-related risks and opportunities, regulations, and developing nature strategies in response
• Infrastructure Resilience and Adaptation - Helping clients build resilience against climate risk into their organisational processes, structures, culture and systems
• Supply Chain Circularity - Reducing emissions and driving performance via supply chain using circular economy approaches
• ESG in Real Estate ‘Creating a Sustainable Portfolio’ - Supporting real estate organisations including developers, investment trusts and property managers to create resilient, disclosure compliant and sustainable portfolios

At KPMG, we have also leveraged our deep technical skillsets and expertise to create bespoke offerings that generate powerful actionable insights for clients, helping them on the sustainability journey:

ESG Pulsecheck - A diagnostic tool that assesses an organisation’s ESG maturity as well as benchmarking ESG performance against peers

ESG Controls - A co-developed scope of four or five lenses through which we verify that the organisation adheres to ESG regulations and standards