INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT:
INFRASTRUCTURE IS A KEY SOLUTION TO CLIMATE RISK by Paul Davies, Head of Market Capability, Infrastructure Sustainability Council of Australia (ISCA)
While the world is rightly focused on the impacts and solutions to Novel Coronavirus, a larger, more sustained threat continues to lurk in the background: climate change.
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s challenging as COVID-19 is to our social and economic well-being, we have faced many such pandemics and epidemics before – plague, influenza, HIV, Ebola, Zika and SARS, to name a few. What we have not faced before in recorded human history, other than in the ice ages, is climate change, and specifically global warming. Our geologic records tell us that global warming has occurred before, but humans have not previously had to confront and adapt to it as a global species. Unlike the expected course of pandemics, climate change is not a challenge to be solved by a short-term change in social practices and advances in medical science. Climate change is a long-term, complex and hugely impactful challenge that affects not just humans, but all species on this planet and it is not amenable to short-term fixes. Infrastructure has a remarkable influence on carbon emissions, and therefore anthropogenic climate change. In Australia at the present time, 70 per cent of our national greenhouse gas emissions are directly or indirectly enabled by infrastructure.
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