If you spend any time reading climate scientists’ prognostications for the future of the planet — not recommended for the faint of heart — it is clear the risks of climate change are real and will impact infrastructure and communities in a variety of ways. Stronger storms, rising sea levels and more intense heat already pose challenges to infrastructure built decades ago and underwritten without a full recognition of how changing climate might challenge its performance and affect the communities it serves.  

In April of 2015, my boss, Jonathan Schein, senior vice president of global business development at Institutional Real Estate, Inc., asked me about taking on business development for Institutional Investing in Infrastructure. My first reaction was “No!” The only thing I knew about infrastructure — bridges, toll roads, trains, airports — was how to use them, and, well, I hadn’t even heard of a P3 at the time. 

The following article is the third of several excerpts that have appeared in i3 from Infrastructure Investment, Private Finance, and Institutional Investors: Asia from a Global Perspective, a report commissioned by the Asian Development Bank Institute that reviews infrastructure investment and finance in Asia from a global perspective. The report with footnotes and references is available at www.georginderst.com, www.adb.org, or https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2721577. 

The previous excerpt provided an overview of the sources of infrastructure finance for projects in Asia. The next excerpt will cover institutional investors as financiers of Asian infrastructure and will be published in the July/August issue.