Resilience Toolbox

SuRe  

The Standard for Sustainable and Resilience Infrastructure (SuRe®)

SuRe® – the Standard for Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure is a third-party-verified, global voluntary standard, which drives the integration of sustainability and resilience aspects into infrastructure development and upgrade by providing guidance for infrastructure project developers, financiers and public-sector institutions. The Standard assesses infrastructure throughout the project life cycle at the design, construction and operational phases. SuRe® consists of 14 themes covering 61 criteria across environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in addition to two general reporting requirements for impact measurement.

SuRe® can be applied to all types of infrastructure, including critical infrastructure systems and infrastructure services, such as: Water (harvesting, storage, management, distribution, treatment and recycling); Energy (generation, storage and distribution); Solid waste (collection, distribution, processing, recycling and storage); Transport networks, nodes and fleet (pedestrian, bicycle, vehicular, rail, water-borne and air transportation); Communication networks (telephone, cellular and data); Social infrastructure (education, healthcare, sports and recreation, law enforcement, fire and emergency services); Food systems (production, storage, processing and distribution).

SuRe® development followed the ISEAL Alliance Codes of Good Practice for standard setting, and as of October 2018, SuRe® is the first infrastructure standard to be an Associate Member of ISEAL, the global membership association for credible and good practice in sustainability standards. Other members of ISEAL include FSC, Fair Trade, Better Cotton Initiative BCI, SA 8000 and others. The first certifiable version of the SuRe® Standard was released at COP23 2017. Since then, SuRe® has entered into the SuRe® Initial Implementation Phase 2018-2019 whereby projects will be assessed on all SuRe® material criteria and, if compliant, be awarded a SuRe® certification.

GIB has also developed the self-assessment tool based on the SuRe®, called The SmartScan. The SmartScan is an infrastructure self-assessment tool developed on the basis of the SuRe® Standard for Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, that provides a rapid assessment of an infrastructure project against sustainability and resilience criteria covering Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues.

SmartScan offers cities and project owners a practical and rapid way to:

• enhance their awareness about sustainability and resilience-related good practices;
• prepare projects for the scrutiny of financial services;
• increase the project attractiveness for potential investment.

The SmartScan has been applied to more than 25 infrastructure projects in the sectors of Water, Energy, Transport networks, Communication technologies installations, in countries such as China, Mexico, India, Philippines, Kosovo and Ecuador, with a total CAPEX of 18 Billions USD

Developed by
Global Infrastructure Basel