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Contreras Casado, Cristina

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Contreras Casado

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Cristina

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Contreras Casado, Cristina

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    An Envision Rating System Approach to Sustainable Infrastructure in Latin American and the Caribbean. Infrastructure 360 Awards, Lessons Learned.
    (2016-11-10) Contreras Casado, Cristina; Leighton, Mark; Gloria, Thomas P.
    The infrastructure spending required to supply global demand (the infrastructure gap) has been estimated at US$3.7 trillion annually worldwide. Considering this demand and the vast amount of social and environmental capital invested in closing the gap, it is especially important to create more sustainable infrastructure projects. In order to define the criteria to be applied, it is crucial to answer questions such as: (i) What are the best practices to apply in a project for a more sustainable outcome? (ii) What is the current state of sustainability integration in infrastructure projects? To narrow the scope, this research will focus on the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, and will be framed by the initiative of the Infrastructure 360 Awards. This initiative was promoted by a partnership of the Inter-American Development Bank and Harvard University to identify, evaluate, and reward sustainable practices implemented in infrastructure projects developed in the LAC region. This initiative provides an unparalleled body of knowledge by the uniform application of the same methodology (the Envision rating system) to a total of 38 projects, making it possible to draw conclusions about the current sustainability performance of an infrastructure project and opportunities for improvement. To participate in the Infrastructure 360 Awards initiative, projects had to be privately funded, with a budget of more than US$30 million, and had to be in a current phase of construction during the year of the award or recently completed. The Envision rating system data on these projects was used to test the following hypotheses: (1) larger-scale infrastructure projects in Latin America have incorporated better practices than smaller-scale projects; (2) projects located in more developed countries have stronger regulatory frameworks in social and environmental requirements and therefore more sustainable outcomes; (3) projects financed by multilaterals, such as the World Bank, Investment Financial Institution (IFC) or the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), will have more sustainable practices, and score higher in the assessment, than projects financed by other sources; and (4) project typology plays an important role in determining the sustainability outcome of the projects. To test these hypotheses, a statistical analysis was conducted using R3.3.1 software, as well as spreadsheet analysis. According to the statistical analysis, and taking an alpha level of 0.05, the project typology- hypothesis 4- was statistically significant. The other three hypotheses would require a larger sample size of 139 projects to achieve enough explanatory power to reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis testing 64.30% of the possible variables correlations. The spreadsheet analysis conducted took two different views: (i) analysis by Envision category and (ii) analysis by project typology. This showed that project leadership is a key matter to ensure high sustainability, that projects have low scores in issues related to infrastructure resiliency, and that water and waste projects have overall high performance vs. transportation or energy ones. Besides advancing the state of knowledge in the field of infrastructure sustainability, this research also provides a framework of preferable practices to be applied for decision makers, developers or policymakers for improving the sustainability performance of infrastructure projects.