Sustainable urban infrastructure offers multiple co-benefits that reduce carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, enhance climate resiliency, create quality jobs and address inequality. Explore our guidelines to see how your city can implement greener options into its infrastructure development strategy.
Green infrastructure helps reduce flood risks, improve public health and bolster biodiversity. It treats stormwater closer to its source while offering natural ways for it to return back into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration.
Water
Urban water resources are essential components of a sustainable city. These include parks, greenways and trails, street trees and other spaces that provide pollution control, biodiversity enhancement and climate resilience by keeping stormwater away from sewer systems.
Utilizing natural, non-potable water sources to meet municipal drinking, bathing and cleaning needs saves both money and energy by eliminating the need to heat and transport potable drinking water, as well as transport clean recycled water back to homes and businesses.
Sustainable urban infrastructure refers to infrastructure systems designed, constructed, and maintained in ways that ensure both economic and environmental (including climate resilience ) sustainability over the lifetime of its system. This may be achieved using nature-based or conventional approaches; critical engagement with urban infrastructure offers us an opportunity to challenge dominant narratives underlying unsustainable development trajectories while charting pathways toward alternative development pathways; taking a multi-level perspective can assist us in reaching these goals.
Energy
Implementing sustainable urban infrastructure requires understanding how energy is utilized within cities. This is important, as city energy use often leads to ecological issues with serious ramifications for both individuals and society as a whole.
Green infrastructure refers to the integration of natural elements into built environments in order to increase environmental sustainability, foster biodiversity, and strengthen urban resilience and quality of life. Examples of such integration include parks, green roofs, wetlands and other forms of urban vegetation.
As pressures to decarbonise our economy and mitigate climate change intensify, creating resilient urban infrastructure is of utmost importance. Nature-based infrastructure (NBI) offers cost effective climate-resilient solutions with co-benefits for both people and nature; therefore it should become a central element in cross-sector city planning and project assessments.
Transportation
From Paris Breathes to London Living Walls, cities around the world are increasingly incorporating greenery on a grand scale into urban environments. Not only are these efforts beautifying cities but they’re also creating green infrastructure–an essential component of sustainable urban development that reduces energy costs, environmental impacts, and increases livability simultaneously.
An efficient sustainable city can reduce energy use and reliance on fossil fuels by adopting smart grid technology, investing in alternative transportation alternatives, and encouraging its residents to commute by walking, bicycling or public transit.
Sustainable cities also prioritize green infrastructure such as rooftop gardens and rainwater collection cisterns, in combination with energy efficiency measures to lower CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change. Lowering building and transportation energy consumption through improved design as well as installing energy-saving appliances, lighting, heating/cooling systems etc can all reduce carbon emissions significantly. If you would like more information about how Fulcrum’s mobile data collection platform can enhance field inspection/quality processes please request a no-committal demo now.
Waste
At least half of humanity lives in cities, contributing disproportionately to carbon emissions and necessitating environmental sustainability for urban infrastructure to ensure global wellbeing.
Reducing waste is essential to creating sustainable urban infrastructure, and can be accomplished through recycling and repurposing materials, limiting consumption of single-use products, encouraging sustainable lifestyles (reusable coffee mugs and repair cafes), or applying circular economy principles.
Modern societies produce one ton of waste per person every year, most of which is recycled or diverted from landfills by reusing and recycling material streams. In many countries, any remaining trash is incinerated to reduce volume while creating electricity through waste heat production; any excess heat produced spins a turbine which generates electricity as well. Landfills remain necessary as storage locations for materials which cannot be reduced or recycled in order to prevent leaching into groundwater sources.
One of the key strategies for developing sustainable urban infrastructure is investing in nature-based infrastructure (NBI). Studies indicate that every USD 1 spent on NBI yields three times greater value than investing only in grey infrastructure.