IISD has developed a Sustainable Asset Valuation (SAVi) tool to help governments and investors assess the true costs–and risks–associated with infrastructure projects in order to make better decisions.
As a baseline, SAVi provides an assessment of the Total-Cost-of-Ownership and financial feasibility of individual infrastructure projects, from highways and solar parks to buildings and irrigation projects. The financial feasibility analysis includes the pricing of environmental, social and economic performance in order to give governments and investors a clear and detailed picture of how and why a sustainable infrastructure project is more financially attractive.
The added value of SAVi, however, is its ability to identify and price the broader co-benefits that sustainable infrastructure brings to the domestic economy: enhanced GDP, avoided spending on pollution clean-up and public health services, more jobs, the opportunity to up-skill and much more. Governments and investors can then make infrastructure decisions based on the total value created by projects and not simply on the financial feasibility at the point of procurement. When a project is planned and deployed to create net value, the project is automatically de-risked across its entire life cycle. In other words, SAVi shows why sustainability and profitability in infrastructure go hand in hand.
SAVi also assesses project risks under three different climate change scenarios, such as the number of days a coal plant would need to shut down due to increased air temperatures and decreased water availability.
IISD seeks to work with policy makers, project developers, sponsors and investors, to assess the climate and other environmental, social, economic and governance risks of their projects, portfolios and project pipelines.