Sustainable & Climate-Smart Infrastructure Explained

TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Larson: Did you know that roughly 75% of the infrastructure we'll be using in 2050 hasn't even been built yet? That means every decision our world makes now about how and where to build roads, bridges, and power lines could make or break our ability to protect nature for future generations. Today's episode will give you a deep dive into this topic and break down some of the best practices that leaders need to follow to find the right balance between development and conservation. Keep listening for more...

Welcome to Nature Breaking, a podcast produced by World Wildlife Fund. I'm Seth Larson. When you think about infrastructure - roads, bridges, railways, ports - you probably picture progress. Connecting communities, boosting economies, making life easier. But here's the catch: If we don't plan these projects with sustainability and resilience in mind, they can come with serious costs, from fragmented habitats to increased flooding.

So how do we build the infrastructure we need without sacrificing the ecosystems we depend on? Today we're diving into that question with Ryan Bartlett, WWF's Director for Climate Smart Planning and Design. Ryan leads some of WWF's most innovative work on sustainable infrastructure. We'll talk about why these issues matter and what best practices the world needs to abide by as we build out the communities of the 21st century.

Before we jump in, don't forget to subscribe to Nature Breaking on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Subscribing is free. It simply means that you'll see every episode in your feed when you open your favorite podcast app.

And if you have ideas for future topics, email us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Now here's my conversation with Ryan Bartlett.

Okay, Ryan Bartlett, welcome to Nature Breaking.

Ryan Bartlett: Great to be here, thanks Seth.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Thanks for taking the time today. This is a really interesting and important topic. I think it's increasingly at the forefront of some of the things we need to be thinking about. And I wanna start with this: infrastructure is essential to human progress and wellbeing, I think we all know that. We also need a lot more of it. But as I said in my intro, poorly designed infrastructure can cause real harm to biodiversity, climate, nature, and people and communities. So how can we square those two thoughts in our heads?

Ryan Bartlett: I would talk about it in two ways. One is: A. There's an opportunity. In your intro you talk about 75% of the infrastructure that we anticipate by, excuse me, by 2050 not existing yet. And...

Seth Larson: Yeah. That's crazy.

Ryan Bartlett: Such huge number

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: It's hard to wrap your mind around, especially when you think about how much concrete there already is in many of the places that we, we live in and, we see on a day-to-day basis. That tells me, one, that there's just an enormous opportunity to influence that. But especially there's also an imperative on top of that. We cannot do things the way that we did in the past that have led to, has led to this really significant biodiversity and climate crisis.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: So with that massive tsunami of infrastructure and concrete that's coming, we have to do it differently. The other thing I would say is that there are so many great lessons that we can learn, the sort of the failures and the mistakes that we have made in developed economies like the US and Europe and other places where we've built a lot of bad infrastructure, or at least infrastructure that could have been planned and built a lot better. And we're seeing that, especially with climate change now.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: New extremes that are wiping out infrastructure that clearly wasn't built to handle that kind of weather extremes.

Seth Larson: Yeah, no, this is a super interesting topic and I think it's unquestionably true that there was a ton of infrastructure built, certainly in the United States in the last century and even into this century that you know, the only thing that planners had in mind was, well we need a road to get from here to there.

And like, not a lot of other thought went into it in terms of environmental management or disrupting communities.

I'm slowly working my way through The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which you know has a lot of history about the development of infrastructure in and around New York City and how like communities were just, it's really sad. I mean, communities were just disrupted and plowed through, and roads were built without a lot of care for the needs of people or like the impact on the environment.

But this, it does feel like we have so much more information. We're hopefully thinking more carefully about these things now, and we can move forward developing the infrastructure of this century a little bit more sustainably. So, before we get into sort of how to do that, I would love for you to actually share some examples of where infrastructure has gone badly.

I think hearing a couple examples helps paint a picture for people and helps sort of illustrate how we can change things in the future.

Ryan Bartlett: Yeah.

Unfortunately, there's kind of an embarrassment of riches, in terms of examples infrastructure that's had unintended consequences. That's really the phrase that I would emphasize.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: Rarely is it, rarely these kinds of impacts on nature, wildlife and the planet, and in terms of climate change, part of the design or the goals of developers or clients and governments, who are just trying to meet basic service needs in a lot of cases. But really you can pick a sector. Let's focus on transportation.

Seth Larson: Sure.

Ryan Bartlett: There's a reason that WWF is so focused on roads in particular, is that we see a road that's built between two points, say it's a couple of cities across the Amazon.

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Bartlett: To build that road, to connect those two cities, which is, you know, totally justified from a development perspective, you're trying to increase the flow of goods and reduce costs, make it easier for farmers to get their products to market. Make it easier for communities to get access to a hospital, or to go to the big city, or whatever it might be. But the unintended consequence of that, we've seen this now, you can see it very clearly through satellite imagery, is the amount of deforestation that occurs once that road is built.

So we call it the fishbone pattern of deforestation. You get a road that's built between those two points on a vertical line. And then gradually over time you see the fishbone developing out new feeder roads along the side of that. And then a decade, two decades, three decades later, it's completely shifted from what used to be an intact forest that was providing a lot of benefits, if nothing else for wildlife populations, but a lot of, what we, will talk more about later but ecosystem services, nature's contributions for people and economies. Those just get completely wiped out as the land use shifts from that intact forest to agriculture and eventually urbanization. And that rarely, that kind of long-term and also much larger spatial impact is rarely thought about in planning discussions at the highest levels.

And so that's one of our goals here is to try to incorporate that kind of data and information on those benefits that nature's providing much earlier in the planning process so that there's a more accurate comparison of the overall cost and benefits of something like that.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean on the one hand that makes all the sense in the world. You build a road to get from to between two places, which does make a lot of sense and does help a lot of the people that live along that road. But then, yeah, you can see logically how well this community is kind of near that road and they wanna have an access road to get to that road. And so, and then this one says, hey, they got that I want the same. And then all these roads just, and then the forest just disappears. And yeah, no mal intention, but that is kind of the outcome. And so I do want to get into like what are some best practices to, to avoid that. I mean, we don't want to deny people access to important infrastructure like roads, but what are some ways that planners can design infrastructure for sustainability to avoid those outcomes?

Ryan Bartlett: There's a lot of room for improvement, I would say.

Seth Larson: Sure.

Ryan Bartlett: One point I would emphasize is just stakeholder engagement. Trying to really include people in the process because it has a real cost. The Inter-American Development Bank did a study a few years ago looking at over 400 of its projects that it's funded in infrastructure. And they discovered huge costs associated with project delays or cancellations, of a lack of sufficient engagement with affected communities and other interest groups. And so it may not seem like there's a cost, or that it's more efficient to just avoid those consultations at the outset because you have a handshake agreement with the government, which is the main client and a developer. It's a lot faster to just plow ahead. But ultimately those costs come back around, by slowing projects down through protests. We've seen plenty of infrastructure projects stopped entirely because of a lack of a consultation process.

So that's one key aspect I would say.

The other, and this is what back to my previous example that really trying to push here and we can talk more about this later with some specific projects, but to really improve the understanding of the ecosystems that are both affected by a potential project, like a big toll road that's connecting two places, but also what we call the dependencies.

So that same road, and a lot of infrastructure relies on the benefits that nature provides. Easiest way to think about this is in terms of climate change impacts and risks. So we see more and more extreme weather, extreme rainfall events. We know that a forested hillside is, does a much better job of reducing erosion and landslide risk than something that's been deforested and denuded, where that water runs rapidly off and increases flash flooding and flooding risks downstream. We're trying to really do a better job of incorporating that kind of information much earlier in the planning process. So a best practice is to increase the amount that we're evaluating what nature is doing in the particular targeted geography of a potential project. And yeah, the as I mentioned, the early and often stakeholder engagement. Those are two that I would really highlight as particularly critical.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, one other issue that comes to mind that I know we as the World Wildlife Fund have been focused on and that we've tried to develop some solutions to is, the issue of roads or highways or other built infrastructure, bisecting species habitat and preventing species that are migratory from getting from, you know, one part of where they typically roam to the other. And that's like another issue that we're tracking and trying to plan for, right?

Ryan Bartlett: Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. That's another critical point of this. If you aren't able to... so I should go back and emphasize a critical point here too on what we call the mitigation hierarchy, the biodiversity mitigation hierarchy.

Seth Larson: All right. Yeah. Tell us what that is.

Ryan Bartlett: It just means that there is a hierarchy of how to avoid, to mitigate, to restore and then to offset the impacts that a potential project is having on nature and wildlife populations. So what I was talking about is really critical and is doing as much as we can in the avoid stage. So if there is an intact, solid piece of old growth forest that's providing a lot of benefits for people and nature is to make sure that a project, like a road, is routed around that.

So the avoid stage, emphasizing as much as we can, avoiding those biggest risks, is really where we should be concentrating the majority of our efforts. But if we cannot avoid, then we do the best we can, in terms of either mitigating those risks, so trying to reduce them through design, and that's where the concept of connectivity really comes in, ecosystem connectivity. Wildlife migrate.

We see a lot of migration patterns of different kinds of species around the world. And often those migration routes cut across big linear infrastructure like roads.

Seth Larson: Yep.

Ryan Bartlett: It's a huge problem globally. It's something people don't really have a lot of concept of, unless they have, like when I was a kid and we were in Yellowstone, we were driving around a corner at night and almost completely totaled the car by running into a bison. That's just one example, but that's a, we got lucky. But that happens so many times, around the world on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis, and it has enormous costs. People die unfortunately. It kills a lot of wildlife. So one of the things we can do is to better map that connectivity so that we are designing roads to respond to it through things like wildlife underpasses where you're actually like digging trenches under roads so that species can move through... some cases as big enough to support populations of elephants so that they can move under these things. Or like marsupials through air bridges, canopy bridges, connecting treetops over roads.

Yeah, ecosystem connectivity and designing for it and now as we're seeing actually restoring it, bringing it back into existing infrastructure, is a huge opportunity. It's happening all around the world. Europe has a lot of great examples of this. We're building the largest one in the world right now. Over $200 million, all privately funded, to go across, I think it's eight lanes of highway in, outside of Los Angeles and LA County to provide, to reconnect habitat for a mountain lion population that's...

Seth Larson: Yeah. I've heard about this. Yeah. This has been in the news a fair bit about the mountain lions having this issue in California.

Ryan Bartlett: It's one of the easiest ways to really directly understand what I'm talking about. And I would really encourage your listeners and viewers to just go look for, 'cause often they will set up camera traps, wildlife cameras, on either side of these, these wildlife overpasses, and almost immediately you see pictures of black bears or mountain lions or deer using them right away. It just is so much proof that this is a solution that works and it immediately starts to restore that connectivity in the system.

Seth Larson: Yeah. So you just mentioned how this is such a global problem and I want to kind of turn our attention more globally now. We're gonna talk in a minute about two specific initiatives that WWF is leading on the sustainable infrastructure front. One's called the Sustainable Infrastructure Program in Asia, and the other's called the Greening Transportation Infrastructure Development, or GRID, G-R-I-D program. It's, we are all about acronyms. The first of those programs as the name implies, is specifically focused on Asia. And the second I know we'll support at least some work in Asia. So I wanted to just ask you to talk first before we get into those programs about why Asia in particular is such a focal point of this work.

Ryan Bartlett: It's the place. I mean it's, this is happening everywhere right now, but it's maybe the place where we see the most direct tension between development needs and the amount of investment in infrastructure. Also a very rich base of relatively intact biodiversity habitat. So for example, if we look at that Living Planet Index, again, that I mentioned, WWF releases this report every two years. It tracks representative wildlife populations to get a sense of how they're doing over time, as an indicator of overall planetary health. And unfortunately, it's on a very negative downward trend for a long time now. On a global level it's somewhere around 70%, 72% I think.

The, in Asia, it's closer to more like 50-55%, and so that tells you that there's still a lot of relatively intact habitat that supports a lot of biodiversity. The Coral Triangle is the most biodiversity rich ecosystem on the planet in Indonesia and the Philippines. And so there's just, that's there's a lot of tension between development needs, huge population growth and a lot of intact biodiversity. And then if you look at the projected statistics, coming back around to that 75%, and the trillions of dollars that we're gonna see invested in infrastructure in the future. Asia is the region that will see the largest amount. McKinsey just released a forecast for 2040 and they're estimating $70 trillion in needed infrastructure investment in Asia.

Seth Larson: $70 trillion?

Ryan Bartlett: I know I don't even know. I don't have a good analogy for you for $70 trillion, but it's so much money and that just shows you how much demand there is to meet basic services. Water, energy supply, sanitation, et cetera. Roads is a huge one, as well. And so there's just gonna be a real crush of infrastructure in Asia. And so the sooner we can get ahead of that, get really emphasize that 'avoid stage,' provides us the biggest opportunities from a planning perspective, to keep as much nature intact as possible, that Asia really needs that support right now.

Seth Larson: Got it. So let's talk about this, the Sustainable Infrastructure Program in Asia. It I know it's designed to help countries integrate nature-based solutions into their planning. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more specifically about that program.

Ryan Bartlett: It's coming to a close this coming year in the first quarter of 2026.

Seth Larson: And how long has it been, how long has it been running for?

Ryan Bartlett: It started in the fall of 2020. So that'll be, it'll be about a four and a half to five-year program. We worked for a couple of years before that, to design it and then to access the funds so that... it's funding from the German government. The German Minister of the environment, nuclear safety, through an initiative called the International Climate Initiative. Every year they release a call for, proposals in certain aspects of conservation, sustainable development.

And so we partnered with the organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD. And we were just one of many other partners implementing in Central and Southeast Asia. And so WWF focused our work in two countries, in Indonesia and the Philippines. It was really the first chance we had to prove a concept along the lines of what I was talking about, the opportunity in the avoid stage. At the very start of the project, the first chance we got to travel following the pandemic and...

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: It was crazy. It was rough to start a project that way.

Seth Larson: Yeah, for sure.

Ryan Bartlett: And by the time we got on the ground and had a meeting with our colleagues at the Bappenas, which is the Economic Development Planning Agency of Indonesia, they gave a presentation about how they do strategic infrastructure project prioritization. In other words, how do they determine the list of the biggest projects? You know their top, let's say hundreds of millions, multi-billion-dollar projects that are critical for the country. And they presented that they screen them for carbon intensity. Which is common, you talk about sustainable infrastructure, that's the first thing that comes to mind for most people is that it's about how carbon heavy it is. That we largely see it that way. So our goal as an organization has been really to broaden that definition, to really make the importance of considering nature and biodiversity in the planning process.

So this project was our chance to do that. And in that meeting, in seeing that they had no, they, yes, they might have screened projects for their carbon intensity, but they have no process of screening projects for their significance in terms of ecosystem impact. Or to the extent that those projects might rely on ecosystem services. Or the contributions that nature provides, like climate resilience and the example that I talked about earlier of an intact forest reducing flood risk for people in infrastructure downstream. So it was a huge...

Seth Larson: That's so interesting. I mean,

Ryan Bartlett: Yeah.

Seth Larson: The climate agenda has driven so much investment and priority in the environmental space over the last 10, 20 years. And I think this is something we see in other places too, and why we're trying to sort of elevate nature, to try to be on a parallel, 'cause they are so complimentary. But anyways, I think that's interesting. But carry on.

Ryan Bartlett: Yes, but also this is not entirely outside of climate. So the other thing I should emphasize is that this was, we were collaborating with OECD under an adaptation and resilience component of this work.

Seth Larson: Yep.

Ryan Bartlett: So my whole, my whole career has been about trying to demonstrate how nature can support resilience, can help people, and you know, biodiversity, wildlife adapt to the impacts of climate change that we're seeing around the world, by really demonstrating the value of intact or restored ecosystems. And so that was the opportunity with this project. And the reason that is the case, or that I saw a particular, you saw a window here for us to try to influence these governments, is because at the same time the infrastructure sector has started to incorporate more and more nature-based approaches precisely for those benefits, from a climate perspective.

So in some cases, wetlands in combination with an engineered, let's say, a dike or wall or whatever, they're much more effective than a solely concrete based approach, which can be extremely expensive and was designed for a climate that we don't have anymore.

Seth Larson: Yep.

Ryan Bartlett: So more and more we're seeing investments by engineers. We're seeing more proposals from developers, design build firms, around the world. It's becoming best practice to incorporate a significant amount of nature-based solutions. So that overarching trend is happening at the same time. And so I saw an opportunity to really to integrate this kind of information, but a much larger scale.

How can we assess what nature is already doing for us? Because we don't think this way. We know that governments don't see their protected areas and their intact ecosystems. Some do, but the majority don't think about it this way, when they're doing economic development planning, of the economic benefits that those areas are providing from a climate resilience perspective.

And I knew going into this project that those can be significant benefits based on past work that we had done, as part of our partnership with the Natural Capital Project, which is all about... so it's a partnership with Stanford and The Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota to work with partners around the world to really assess and understand those benefits that nature provides. And so this project was really a chance for us to work with these governments to integrate nature's values in what we call upstream planning, really focusing on that avoid stage, try to influence that list of strategic infrastructure projects that they're developing, by also incorporating a lot of the most innovative mapping that we could.

So taking geospatial analysis, so satellite photos, looking at snapshots in time. You can look at those, that imagery, and tell through some complex analysis, through these tools that we've developed through the Natural Capital Project, that tell you just how well that forest for example does in regulating flood risk downstream, or how much water it captures to support drinking water for communities downstream, or how well coastal ecosystems like mangroves and reefs protect coastlines for people in infrastructure, which is another huge benefit from coastal ecosystems.

So yeah, we really worked with the Filipino and Indonesian governments by mapping those critical areas, by supporting them and understanding where in the country spatially relatively intact ecosystems support these really significant climate resilience benefits that nature is providing. And also if they were gonna restore, if they had resources to do ecosystem restoration to try to bring back some of these areas, then we could also develop maps to show them where they should prioritize that kind of restoration. And really from my understanding, this kind of work had just not been done before. And so it was a really innovative opportunity for us to try to prove a concept and see if it works. Can we influence governments and how they plan for significant infrastructure projects by incorporating this kind of information on nature's benefits much earlier in the process?

Seth Larson: Okay, so you're basic, basically piggybacking on the priority that some of these governments are placing on dealing with climate change and mitigating climate impacts for communities, and working alongside them to help them understand how nature can be a partner in achieving that goal and making sure that the steps they're taking aren't having adverse impact on nature.

And on the other side, helping really map out and quantify: if you keep this wetland intact or if you keep this forest intact, or if you restore this area that's been degraded, then that's gonna contribute towards your carbon reduction goal. Right?

Ryan Bartlett: Yeah, carbon but explicitly looked at, in this case, like how keeping those areas intact is gonna reduce vulnerability for...

Seth Larson: Right.

Ryan Bartlett: ...people and the infrastructure network. And it was, results were pretty powerful and significant. We showed that in just 10%, or excuse me, the top 10% of areas that were providing the most benefit... it was a relatively small portion of the country, 15 to 16% in both countries, ultimately supporting over half the population. So millions, hundreds of millions of people in the case of, in case of Indonesia. And almost half or more than half of the road network in the country. So huge bang for buck, in just a small area of the country and what nature is doing, supporting millions of people and hundreds of thousands of kilometers of a road network.

I, and immediate reaction we got, for example, in terms of the practicality of how to use this information was from our colleagues at Bappenas who said, right away we can use this to guide our operations and maintenance plans for the existing road network. Because we could show them where to prioritize, either some restoration or areas that they need to focus on to keep 'em intact because they're directly protecting existing assets that have pretty significant costs when it comes to operations and maintenance, for example.

Seth Larson: Gotcha. Alright, so I wanna save a few minutes to ask you about the GRID program in a minute. But before we get there, I did, you know, this is a roughly a five-year project that you spent a lot of time working on. What are some lessons that you took away from this project that you might be able to apply to this work moving forward?

And I'd love to know if there were any really surprising challenges that arose, or any aspects of the work that were actually easier than you expected? Anything that came up like that?

Ryan Bartlett: Back to my COVID point, just the critical importance of face-to-face meetings

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm.

Ryan Bartlett: How valuable it is. Where there's a cross-cultural exchange and the difference in how westerners process things, we tend to be much more open and competitive and argue with each other publicly. And that is not how you get things done in cultures that are more hierarchical. And so those face-to-face meetings are really important. You can build rapport and trust, and so that took a while.

The other thing was that just how long it can take to, to get access to the data that you need. And there's an inherent tradeoff between, so we could have moved really quick. Knocked out some maps in six months and handed a report to each government and said, there you go, this is our analysis, we hope you use it. But very deliberately at the outset, we wanted to avoid that because we wanted them to own what we worked on collectively, and we wanted to build some capacity along the way. So the whole mapping took much longer than we anticipated for that reason. I think there was a lot of value in doing it that way. But it's just always a slower process than I think it's gonna be. So that's one thing.

And then the other surprising thing that was maybe easier than I anticipated is just how quickly people were supportive of it. They were saying yes, we need this. We see the tragedy unfolding of climate change. My kids are gonna see such a different world. And so I was surprised. There was no immediate resistance at all, in any of the government partners that we were working with.

Seth Larson: Yeah, that's really great to hear. So shifting now I wanna talk about the GRID program, which stands for, again, Greening Transportation Infrastructure Development. This is both a global effort and a country focused effort. WWF is leading the global project. The Asian Development Bank is supporting so-called child projects, which I'll let you explain in a minute, in, uh, in Nepal and the Philippines. The UN Environment Program is supporting child projects in Malaysia and Ukraine. Overall all of this is supported with funding from the Global Environment Facility, the GEF, and it's due to publicly launch in March of this year. But we can talk about it a little now. There's been a lot of pre-work that's gone into it already. So what's the vision for the GRID program and how will it help countries transition to greener transportation systems going forward?

Ryan Bartlett: So the GRID program is really operating at two levels. One is global, trying to influence, as a whole, how transportation is planned and developed exactly along the lines of what I just talked about under that, the previous project. How do we mainstream biodiversity, data, ecosystem services analysis, the transport planning process? So people think greening, as I said before about it's mostly about carbon.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: Definitely not in this case. It's all biodiversity.

Seth Larson: Gotcha.

Ryan Bartlett: That is the gap and the niche that we are filling here that, not surprisingly as a wildlife organization we're trying...

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: ...to bring into, into transport planning. So it's kind of there in the title. So at the global level, really trying to push the whole sector forward so that this becomes commonplace. And then there are child, what they call child projects in the GEF lingo, the Global Environment Facility lingo. So really trying to influence through partnerships with governments in Malaysia, the Philippines... So again, as you mentioned, in Asia, in Southeast Asia and in Nepal, as well, a lot a long history of working to influence transportation in that country. Ukraine, very interestingly, obviously in the context of, of the conflict there.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Ryan Bartlett: And then in Suriname in Latin America. And so the goal there, comparable to the global program, is to really influence transportation planning so that this kind of analysis of the importance of nature, unlike on the previous project we just talked about, not just nature's benefits from a climate resilience and adaptation perspective, but also just purely for biodiversity needs. So more along the example of were talking about with wildlife overpasses and underpasses and migration routes and, what are the needs of wildlife? How do they intersect with proposed or existing transportation assets? And how can we do as much as possible so that kind of data and information is really incorporated in the planning process, and then flows all the way through from planning into design, and development. And so I also just emphasize that this, the GEF saw this as so important and such a gap that they felt the need to create an entire global integrated program around it.

So it'll be a great opportunity to see if we can, like the past project really try to in Indonesia and the Philippines really try to demonstrate, can we do this? Can we really incorporate biodiversity? And what does it look like on the other side?

Seth Larson: Yeah. So Ryan, I'm mindful of time and I don't wanna keep you too much longer. This has been a really educational conversation for me. These are super interesting programs and this is such a really relevant topic right now. So I appreciate your time. Before I let you go, I wanted to ask you to sort of define what success looks like. You know, it's easy to get stuck in in the weeds of these specific programs and these specific places and trying to move the ball forward in little ways here and there. But like big picture, what does success look like for achieving a more sustainable infrastructure world? And how will we know if sustainable infrastructure planning is becoming the norm rather than the exception?

Ryan Bartlett: That is the question, right? There's an inherent tension in working in the planning space because it's planning, it's not necessarily about... it's hard to measure impact there, even though we know it's really critical. So we will see the impact more downstream. And when it comes to actual projects that are built and developed, it'll be very obvious whether or not we have shifted things to, whether we start to see more and more of those examples of... maybe it, maybe it wasn't between two points, between two cities, between a port and a city, right through an intact ecosystem. We'll start to see that actually that road was routed around it because the value of that intact ecosystem was seen to be more important than just blasting right through it from a pure cost perspective.

So one thing is that we will actually start to see outcomes like that on the ground. The other is that, we really we'll need to see that capital, significant amount of money that we're talking about here is actually invested into more sustainable projects. And then the other thing is that we'll see an increase in capacity. In the training and the expertise that governments have. That we'll see more and more people, like me and our, my colleagues that work on this program at WWF that are embedded within governments. And that they're really trying to shift and starting to shift the way that they operate. But yeah, the biggest, most obvious impact on the ground is if we really start to see better projects that are having a lot less impact on nature moving forward.

Seth Larson: Yeah, well I know this, this work is a marathon, not a sprint. This is something that we're gonna really have to be dedicated to for a long time. And as I said the GRID program is just launching, in a few months. So I look forward to checking back with you and some of your colleagues over the next year or two or three as these things continue to play out and we can maybe talk more about are we seeing those results, or if not, what can we do to try to drive more progress? But in the meantime, thank you very much for being here today. I really enjoyed this conversation and have a very good rest of your day today.

Ryan Bartlett: Thanks so much Seth. I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. Happy holidays.

Seth Larson: Happy holidays.

That's a wrap for today's episode. Thanks again to Ryan for explaining some of the unintended consequences that can arise from poor infrastructure planning and sharing strategies for how to better integrate nature into infrastructure development in the future. These decisions can make all the difference between a future that tramples over nature and exacerbates climate change, or a future that balances the needs of people with the needs of our planet. Thank you all for listening, and together let's keep building a more sustainable future.

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