The Adaptation Principles offer a guide to effective climate change adaptation, containing hands-on guidance to the design, implementation and monitoring of national adaptation strategies, showing that each country needs to tailor adaptation actions to its specific needs and priorities. To guide this process, the Adaptation Principles offer concrete and practical tools: Screening questions to identify the most urgent and effective actions, toolboxes illustrating common datasets and methodologies to support decisions, indicators to monitor and evaluate progress, and case studies on how the COVID-19 pandemic influences priorities in taking effective adaptation action.

ThinkHazard! is a web-based tool to analyze the risks of natural hazards (floods, wildfires, earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, water scarcity, extreme heat, tsunamis and cyclones) at national, regional and local level for all countries around the world. The tool provides a simple overview of different hazard levels for any given area and delivers recommendations and guidance for adaptation and safety, including for project design and planning. ThinkHazard! also highlights how each hazard may change in the future as a result of climate change.

The International Good Practice Principles for Sustainable Infrastructure provide globally applicable guidance on the integration of sustainability throughout the entire infrastructure lifecycle, focussing on the “upstream” project level. They help high-level policy- and decision-makers in governments create the enabling environment for sustainable infrastructure that is needed to achieve the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement. The ten principles emphasize the importance of infrastructure approaches that respond to service needs and demands, address sustainability the earliest possible in the planning process, integrate all aspects of sustainability as well as relevant governance frameworks and different infrastructure systems and sectors across time and space.

The report „Benchmarking Infrastructure Development 2020“ assesses the regulatory quality of large infrastructure projects through both Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and Traditional Public Investments (TPIs) in 140 and 40 economies respectively. The corresponding online platform highlights the key findings resulting from the data, organized around the infrastructure project cycle phases (regulatory & institutional framework, preparation, procurement, contract management, management of unsolicited proposals, infrastructure asset management). By providing actionable indicators, the tool supports evidence-based regulatory reforms to improve the enabling environment for developing quality infrastructure projects.

The African Development Bank’s Environmental and Social Assessment Procedures (ESAP) support the integration of environmental, climate change and social considerations in projects and programs of the Bank and its borrowers. The ESAP describe the assessment procedure for different project types and across the full lifecycle from country programming to post completion. Thereby, the ESAP support decision-making and improvement of project results, ensuring that Bank-financed operations conform to the requirements laid out in the operational safeguards (OS) and are thus sustainable.

The EU Taxonomy sets out the overarching conditions that an economic activity has to meet to qualify as sustainable. In order to ensure that investments and financial market activities support those sustainable economic activities, financial market participants active in the EU and companies subject to non-financial disclosure requirements must now incorporate disclosures with reference to the Taxonomy. This way, the Taxonomy aims to help channel capital flows toward sustainable investments in a harmonized and consistent manner across the EU single market, thereby supporting the EU Green Deal and the Paris Agreement, and guide the transition of companies toward sustainable economic activities.

The Water-Hydropower-Agriculture Tool for Investments and Financing (WHAT-IF) tool is a computer-based model developed for economic assessment of water infrastructure (e.g. reservoirs, irrigation, water supply, energy production) within the water-energy-food nexus. The key objective of the tool is to maximize economic welfare considering nexus’ trade-offs, such as crop and power markets and trade, as well as exogenous climate change and socio-economic drivers. Therewith, the tool enables to solve synergies and tradeoffs between those sectors and provides the user with nexus-optimized water infrastructure solutions based on the comparison of different scenarios.

SASB standards are a set of industry-specific standards that identify the subset of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues most important for the sustainability accounting of companies. The standards are designed to enable companies to disclose their financially-material sustainability information to investors in a cost-effective and decision-useful manner. Standards are available for 77 different industries. In the area of infrastructure, standards are available for (1) electric utilities & power generators, (2) engineering & construction services, (3) gas utilities & distributors, (4) home builders, (5) real estate, (6) real estate services, (7) waste management and (8) water utilities & services.

The ESG Due DIligence Tool (ESG DD Tool) aims to provide investors with a transparent view of the ESG risks and opportunities of an infrastructure asset at the due diligence phase. The tool offers a structured process to identify and quantify all potential ESG risks and opportunities, which can make or break the business case of assets. This analysis serves as the basis for investment decision making and future mitigation of all potential (material) ESG issues (or factors) during asset management.

FEASIBLE is a tool that facilitates the iterative process of balancing required finance with available finance, including a systematic, consistent and quantitative framework for consideration of environmental targets. The tool uses input describing existing infrastructures and availability of finance from user charges, public budgets and other sources. Based on the specification of the future service targets and projection of future finance, the model quantifies the resulting gap between the demand for expenditure (to invest in, operate and maintain infrastructure) and the supply of available funds. The tool can also be used to analyze the financial effects of different policy and regulation scenarios.