Supply-chain collective action towards zero CO2 emissions in infrastructure construction: Mapping barriers and opportunities

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Successful decarbonisation of the supply chains for buildings and infrastructure, including the production of basic materials, will involve the pursuit - in parallel - of measures to ensure circularity of material flows, measures to improve material efficiency, and to radically reduce CO2 emissions from basic materials production. Emphasis in this work has been on how “intangible” factors such as implicit or explicit constraints within organisations, inadequate communication between actors in the supply chain, overly conservative norms or lack of information, hinder the realisation of the current carbon mitigation potential. Although this work draw primarily from experiences in Sweden and other developed economies we believe the focus on innovations in the policy arena and efforts to develop new ways of co-operating, coordinating and sharing information between actors (SDG17) and on practices and processes that could enable more sustainable resource use in infrastructure construction may be of relevance also elsewhere. Not the least, since there are still many regions of the world where much of the infrastructure to provide basic services remains to be built (SDG6-7, SDG9, SDG11) a challenge that must be handled in parallel with efforts to reduce/erase the climate impact from infrastructure construction (in line with the Paris Agreement and SDG13).