Natural resources are the foundations for our socio-economic systems. Over the past five decades, the global population has doubled, and the global output has grown fourfold, accompanied by the unprecedented extraction of natural resources. While population growth rates appear to be abating, the socio-economic demands of a growing middle class suggest that our desire to extract finite resources shows no signs of slowing down.
This economic growth has been characterized by rapid industrialization and urbanization and underpinned by large-scale infrastructure development. The development itself has been driven by linear economic models that follow a ‘take, make, dispose’ pathway. Under this predominant model, natural resources and material goods end their lifecycle as waste or emissions, with severe implications for the environment and human health.
This policy brief, Making Infrastructure Resource Efficient, identifies a critical need to decouple economic growth from the extraction and use of natural resources. Infrastructure development is particularly resource intensive, and in 2015 the construction sector alone accounted for half of the global material footprint. Increasing the resource efficiency of infrastructure can be a major driver of the transition to sustainable development. It is now vital that policymakers and planners recognize the interlinkages between natural resources, material resource use, and the diverse and complex systems of infrastructure that are required to support economic and human development.