Infrastructure Partnerships Australia Welcomes Infrastructure Victoria’s Advice on Decarbonisation
OpEd – Adrian Dwyer, Chief Executive, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia
Industry welcomes Infrastructure Victoria’s advice as a significant milestone towards accounting for, and reducing, greenhouse gas emissions in infrastructure delivery.
As a longstanding advocate for sensible reform, it is pleasing to see our advocacy for using a ‘carbon base case’ as a key metric in major project decisions adopted. This includes what should be built, how this can be done, and who delivers it.
Right now, when governments decide where to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars taxpayers’ money to infrastructure programmes, they are flying blind on carbon. That’s not an exaggeration – they have no visibility of the carbon implications in the decisions they make.
For Australia to reach net zero, we must transform how we build.
Infrastructure Victoria’s recommendations made today have the capacity to limit emissions over the life cycle of a project and save infrastructure providers potentially billions of dollars in capital costs – particularly by creating the right incentives to use less of the highest emitting materials like concrete and steel.