Urban infrastructure systems should be designed, constructed, operated and decommissioned in ways that optimize economic viability, social equity, environmental protection and climate resilience for their life cycle. This may include using natural systems or traditional infrastructure solutions.
Attaining this goal involves incorporating natural processes into infrastructure planning, shifting behavioral incentives, and supporting local initiatives to take action.
Water
Cities can meet their water infrastructure needs through environmentally and climate-resilient methods, including restoring natural ecosystems and harnessing nature’s forces for infrastructure services such as flood protection, water filtration and temperature regulation. This approach, known as nature-based infrastructure (NBI), has clear advantages for people, economy and the environment alike.
Urbanization often converts permeable natural landscapes to impervious surfaces, leading to decreased infiltration and groundwater recharge rates (and consequently lower self-purification rates in water bodies), thus increasing demand on municipal water supplies and raising risks of flooding, erosion and sedimentation.
Rainwater coming down onto surfaces often contains contaminants, including road salt or debris; oil, heavy metals or toxins from cars or buildings; pesticides/fertilizers used on lawns/gardens and bacteria from animal waste – turning pure raindrops into polluted runoff that pollutes waterways and atmosphere. Implementing demand management strategies such as pricing policies or leak detection/repair programs can significantly lower consumption while improving sustainability.
Energy
Sustainable infrastructure development is an imperative for cities worldwide. Current infrastructure cannot meet the needs of a rapidly increasing urban population and is vulnerable to extreme weather events, so new generations of infrastructure designed for greater efficiency and environmental friendliness should be created as soon as possible.
Sustainable urban infrastructure refers to the engineered systems that make up a city, including facilities and utilities (water, energy, transportation, sanitation, information and built environment). Sustainability efforts extend beyond simply evaluating these facilities; instead they tackle complex issues like economic growth, climate change and municipal waste disposal.
Integrating green space into urban planning is one way to address these challenges. Parks and gardens, for instance, reduce reliance on private vehicles for transport while mitigating urban heat islands and improving air quality. Furthermore, parks support wildlife habitat while mitigating carbon footprint by sequestering emissions absorbed from emissions sources; furthermore they can also help to reduce wasteful runoff while replenishing groundwater supplies.
Transportation
Transport is an indispensable element of economic development and globalization, linking markets, communities and production sites together. Yet transport-related emissions account for significant greenhouse gas emissions.
Integral urban planning and transport systems that focus on public transit, cycling and walking to integrate with the built environment offer sustainable options for moving people and goods, while decreasing vehicle dependence, fuel consumption, land waste and pollution. Innovative funding mechanisms such as betterment levies that recoup infrastructure costs from adjacent landowners benefiting from transport systems (as has been done in Colombian cities) or cross-subsidy programs which leverage rail development projects for capital expenditure coverage can also help finance new projects.
At its core, sustainable infrastructure requires more than physical improvements alone; to be truly effective it also relies on behavioral change aimed at realizing real sustainability results. This may involve things such as lowering impervious pavement areas; providing abundant, interconnected green space; designing buildings to maximize passive heating and cooling effects; or using non-oil or coal-based alternative energies.
Sanitation
Too many people lack access to safe sanitation systems. Without an effective solution in place, diseases spread from untreated or improperly-treated human waste while pollution from sewage clogs waterways and groundwater resources – impeding progress on various Sustainable Development Goals including 2 (‘Zero Hunger’) and 7 (‘Affordable and Clean Energy’).
But installing a sewage system alone won’t guarantee a cleaner environment; water bills don’t cover enough of the expenses associated with transporting and treating waste water; climate change will only make this challenge worse by disrupting rainfall patterns.
To address these challenges, a new approach must be developed that goes beyond moral appeals to personal responsibility and focuses on urban environment design. This draws from disciplines like behavioral economics, environmental psychology and systems thinking to work with how humans make decisions naturally – the idea being that cities could be built to make sustainable options the simplest, most convenient and socially rewarding options available to residents.