Building for 2050: EDHEC Takes the Stage at OECD Infrastructure Forum
In response to mounting climate risks, demographic changes, and evolving economic conditions, the 2025 OECD Infrastructure Forum brought together international policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers to examine how infrastructure systems can adapt to emerging global pressures. Under the theme “Roadmap to 2050 – Infrastructure for a Changing World,” the forum explored forward-looking strategies for building resilient, inclusive, and sustainable infrastructure. EDHEC played a leading role through the active participation of the EDHEC Climate Institute (ECI) and Scientific Climate Ratings (SRC), an EDHEC Venture.
Driving Global Standards with the Blue Dot Network
On April 23, Camille Angué, Deputy Director in Charge of Outreach at the EDHEC Climate Institute (ECI), took part in the Blue Dot Network Executive Consultation Group Meeting in Paris. As a Knowledge Partner to the Blue Dot Network (BDN) since 2023, ECI contributes scientific expertise to support the development of high-quality infrastructure standards—ensuring that certified projects meet criteria for sustainability, resilience, and transparency.
Camille presented the ClimaTech project, a matrix-based tool developed by ECI that benchmarks decarbonisation and resilience strategies across 101 infrastructure subclasses. The project has the potential to inspire strategic evolutions within BDN’s certification criteria—helping ensure that endorsed infrastructure projects meet the highest standards of environmental and financial performance.
Accelerating Investment for Resilience
On April 24, Rémy Estran, CEO of Scientific Climate Ratings (an EDHEC initiative), joined a high-level OECD panel on “Accelerating Resilient Infrastructure” to present cutting-edge methodologies that quantify both the cost of inaction and the benefits of investment in climate resilience.
Rémy introduced a novel two-step approach developed by EDHEC to assess the financial materiality of climate risk:
- Quantifying Financial Exposure: Using a net asset value model, infrastructure cash flows are projected and discounted without climate risks, then recalculated by integrating both macroeconomic scenarios (like GDP or inflation from NGFS or Oxford Economics) and highly granular, asset-specific physical risk data—such as flood exposure based on 10-meter precision hazard maps. The result is a comparative risk profile that helps determine climate vulnerability.
- Evaluating the Benefits of Resilience Strategies: EDHEC’s ClimateTech database catalogues decarbonisation and resilience options across infrastructure subclasses, detailing both their costs (as a share of total assets) and their effectiveness (measured as reductions in potential damages). This empowers investors and policymakers to make informed decisions that maximise impact and minimize long-term losses.
Rémy emphasised that such analysis is essential to prioritising investments where they deliver the greatest benefit, particularly for vulnerable populations and communities.
“Stakeholders can now critically evaluate the cost of inaction versus the cost and effectiveness of resilience strategies—and allocate investments where they can have the greatest impact on people”, says Rémy Estran, CEO, Scientific Climate Ratings.
Rémy Estran was joined on the panel by an esteemed group of international experts, including George Karagiannis from the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI); Takahiro Konami from Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism; Francisco Lozano Gamba of Colombia’s Financiera de Desarrollo Nacional; and Régis Thépot from the Association Française de Prévention des Catastrophes Naturelles et Technologiques (AFPCNT). The session was moderated by Robert Addison of the OECD Public Governance Directorate.
This final session of the OECD Infrastructure Forum brought critical reflections on both the political and technical dimensions of resilient infrastructure. It underscored the importance of political will, especially in leveraging public momentum following climate-related emergencies, and highlighted the need for ready-to-implement projects that can rapidly secure policy consensus. The discussion called for a shift in insurance markets toward proactively investing in risk prevention and explored how resilient infrastructure standards can be effectively financed—whether by end users or with government support. Above all, the session emphasised the growing availability of tools to measure the costs of action and inaction, providing clear evidence to guide strategic investment. It concluded with a strong consensus on the essential role of governments in de-risking future projects, creating an enabling environment for sustainable and impactful infrastructure investment.
A Dual Commitment to Resilient Infrastructure
The participation of the EDHEC Climate Institute and Scientific Climate Ratings in the OECD Infrastructure Forum highlights their shared focus on applying data and scientific analysis to infrastructure planning. Their contributions—ranging from developing tools to inform certification standards to enhancing investment decision-making through resilience metrics—reflect an ongoing engagement with the practical challenges of building more robust and sustainable infrastructure systems.
- For more information on the conference, visit the OECD Infrastructure Forum website
- For more information on EDHEC Climate Institute's research programme on Resilience and Transition Tech, visit this page
- Read the latest ECI article, "Technological Solutions to Mitigate Transition and Physical Risks"
