Infrastructure

№ 2026-52 · October 2026 · 17 min

Demographic Growth Inside the Global Risk Envelope

Since 1975 the world's urban centres have added 2.1 billion people, and growth has leaned into the floodplain: the urban population in 100-year river flood zones tripled to 507 million while cities as a whole grew 2.3 times, with one new resident in six settling in a flood zone. Six in ten new city dwellers settled in cities exposed to at least one major hazard, and 746 million now live where two or more compound. Most of the growth still to come is unbuilt — the cheapest moment for safer settlement decisions.

№ 2026-51 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Global Water Polycrisis

The water polycrisis has two faces. In 35 countries with 4.1 billion people, from Egypt to India and China, water is physically scarce: withdrawals exceed 40% of supply, agriculture takes three-quarters and aquifers are falling. In 47 countries with 1.6 billion people, mostly in Africa, water is plentiful but nearly a third of people lack basic water, unsafe water kills at six times the rate of well-served countries and grids hang on hydropower. They meet in Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen — and each needs a different fix.

№ 2026-39 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Geography of Human Survivability Under Climate Stress

Where coping capacity is strong, recorded deaths from floods, storms, droughts, landslides and wildfires stay near 0.6 per million people a year whether hazard is low or high. Where it is weak they rise to 8.7 per million in the most exposed third — a 14-fold gap. About 14,000 recorded deaths a year are avoidable at that benchmark, and the true toll is larger because heat deaths are counted almost only in rich countries.

№ 2026-30 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Infrastructure of Sustainable Economic Convergence

Across 110 economies that started the century below half the OECD's income, starting poorer did not mean growing faster. Among countries with similar access to power and similar outage rates, poorer ones caught up about a percentage point a year faster for each halving of starting income. Mapping catch-up growth since 2000 against electricity, logistics, cooling and connectivity shows power as the binding gate and the others as multipliers that depend on it.

№ 2026-29 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Global South Resilience Stack

Internet use has exceeded electricity access by more than five points in only 10 of 3,072 country-years across the Global South, and health coverage has rarely passed 60 before electricity reaches 90 per cent. Yet health is the slowest layer to build. On current trends only 28 of 129 low- and middle-income countries reach universal energy, water, health and digital access by 2050. Their data shows the order in which to build.

№ 2026-19 · September 2026 · 23 min

From Payments to Power

Mobile payments connect households to pay-as-you-go solar, but digital collection alone does not make an energy portfolio bankable. This report examines the infrastructure, contract economics and financing structures that turn small payments into durable energy access.

№ 2026-16 · September 2026 · 20 min

Convergence Through Crisis

Pakistan imported 17 GW of solar panels in a single year. South Africa's rooftops went from under 1 GW to over 7 GW. Lebanon's solar capacity rose thirteenfold. None of these were planned transitions; all followed a crisis that made the incumbent unaffordable or unavailable. This report asks what determines whether such a window produces a leapfrog or a diesel generator.

№ 2026-14 · September 2026 · 21 min

Food, Energy, Water: Disruption and Substitution

Nexus disruptions travel along whichever link is tightest: gas into fertiliser into food in 2022, drought into hydropower and into shipping lanes in 2023 and 2024. Clean technologies break those particular chains — and create new ones. This report maps four substitutions, what each buys, and what each newly requires.

№ 2026-13 · September 2026 · 22 min

Climate-Resilient Industrialization Pathways

Green industrial strategy tends to offer every sector the same package. But an aluminium smelter is stopped by the price of electricity, an electronics plant by a four-hour outage, and a garment factory by a heatwave or a flood. Sorting industries by their binding constraint produces a different — and cheaper — sequence of investments.

№ 2026-12 · September 2026 · 22 min

Integrating Adaptation and Mitigation

Climate policy treats adaptation and mitigation as parallel agendas competing for finance. In economies building both capital stocks at once, they are better understood as complements in production — with a minority of cases where they genuinely compete. This report sets out where the dependencies run, where the conflicts are real, and how to appraise an asset that discharges both duties.

№ 2026-11 · September 2026 · 24 min

Air Quality Improvement as a Co-Benefit of Clean Energy Transition in Megacities

Air pollution contributed to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, and an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths a year are attributable to fossil-fuel air pollution that a transition would remove. The burden is heaviest in the thirty-three megacities, where combustion is densest and exposure closest. This report sets out the evidence that decarbonization is, in practice, the largest public-health programme available to them, and how to design it to collect that return.

№ 2026-06 · September 2026 · 19 min

Climate Adaptation as Infrastructure for Global Polycrisis Risk Reduction

Adaptation is counted as a stock of assets, but what protects people is a service that keeps working, and a service runs on a chain. Reliability multiplies rather than averages, so where an investment sits in the network matters more than what it costs — and polycrisis is the case where the links fail together.

№ 2026-05 · September 2026 · 19 min

The Economics of Prevention in an Age of Polycrisis

Prevention is appraised against doing nothing. Its real alternative is emergency response — already being paid for, repeatedly, at surge prices, on crisis financing, leaving no asset and restoring the exposure that produced the loss. The obstacles are institutional, not economic.

№ 2026-03 · September 2026 · 24 min

Climate Adaptation and Development Convergence Across the Global South

Poor countries only began catching up with rich ones around 2000, and the resulting convergence runs at one to two per cent of the income gap a year. Climate hazard already destroys one to two per cent of output a year in low- and middle-income countries. Adaptation, read against convergence, is not insurance but growth-retention policy.

№ 2026-01 · September 2026 · 22 min

The Clean Transition as Global Polycrisis Mitigation Infrastructure

The clean transition is usually argued as climate policy — a cost accepted now for a distant temperature. Read instead as risk-mitigation infrastructure, it lowers four coupled dangers at once: climate destabilisation, air-pollution mortality, energy insecurity and coercive energy geopolitics. The operative variable is not ambition but deployment.