Tools

ADB’s Urban Sector Group has prepared tool kits for guiding the preparation of integrated urban plans or city development plans with inclusive cities, competitive cities, and green cities as the primary focus, depending on the relative importance of the 3E agenda: economy, environment, and equity. This tool kit presents concepts and strategies for addressing technical and institutional challenges related to shelter, infrastructure, transport, climate change, and disaster risk management—all of which are essential for Inclusive Urban Development.

The Environmental and Social Policy Framework (ESPF) aims to contribute to the IDB’s overarching objective of achieving sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean.The ESPF seeks to enhance the sustainability of the IDB-financed investment projects through the application of robust environmental and social risk management standards.

FPIC360° is an Equitable Origin initiative in partnership with the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA), with support from the ISEAL Innovation Fund, which is supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO. The tool helps address the challenges related to monitoring and verifying FPIC (Free, Prior and Informed Consent) through embedding two key principles: Participation and Transparency.

The guidebook elaborates on measuring and quantifying an infrastructure project’s GHG emissions/GHG emission reductions. Its main objectives are to describe relevant GHG accounting principles as well as related concepts and methods, outline the basic process for quantifying and reporting GHG impacts resulting from climate finance projects and describe the role of project-level impact analysis in climate finance project preparation.

The EBRD Green Cities Policy Tool builds on the knowledge and insights gained from EBRD’s investments into Green Cities and presents a wide range of effective policy instruments to improve urban sustainability. Practical and operational policies for municipal authorities and case studies are provided for 7 critical areas of decision making, including sector-specific policy areas such as urban transport, solid waste, water and wastewater, energy and buildings, as well as land planning, green space, and biodiversity. The cross-sectoral policy areas covered are governance and finance.

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 Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) Guidelines contain the EHS performance levels and measures that The World Bank Group requires its clients and borrowers of to apply to their projects. This implies the identification of EHS project hazards and associated risks across all the Guidelines’ dimensions, involvement of EHS professionals in project preparation, priorization of risk management strategies that eliminate the causes of hazards or, if not feasible, of consequence-minimizing controls, and monitoring and community preparation activities, among other. When host country regulations differ from the EHS Guidelines, projects will be required to achieve whichever is more stringent.

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 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.