Twin Talks London: Scaling Capital for Sustainable Infrastructure
London Climate Action Week ‘26
22 June, 2026
Global infrastructure investment remains significantly below the levels required to achieve net-zero transitions, climate resilience, and inclusive growth. Despite increasing private capital, sustainable infrastructure faces structural under-allocation in institutional portfolios, primarily driven by persistent delivery and performance risks.
This Twin Talks session, in partnership with TheCityUK, brought together leaders from across the UK’s financial and professional services ecosystem during London Climate Action Week 2026. They explored how data‑driven approaches are being applied in practice—not as an operational add‑on, but as a decision‑making enabler that supports delivery confidence, underwriting assessment, and long‑term asset value in sustainable infrastructure.
Event speakers: Astrid Manroth, Andrew Walton, Nicola Watkinson, Holly Roberts-Harry, Mark Enzer OBE, and Amelia Burnett.
The discussion addressed how to bridge this massive funding deficit with the integration of public and private capital across the asset lifecycle. Ideally, the primary objectives should be to move beyond past tendencies to ignore the problem and instead focus on actionable, practical strategies, as well as explore how modern technology can be leveraged to support and scale these infrastructure and financing initiatives.
The event began with a fireside chat between journalist Antony Oliver and Amelia Burnett, digital financial strategies director, infrastructure policy advancement at Bentley Systems, who leads IPA’s Advancing Infrastructure Finance work programme.
This conversation set out some of the key challenges and opportunities facing the global infrastructure investment market, specifically how a greater use of infrastructure data and technology can help to mobilise private capital into sustainable infrastructure by improving transparency, strengthening evidence of sustainability performance, and reducing perceived risk.
“We have not necessarily got a capital problem, but we’ve got a problem with confidence in actually deploying that capital into projects.” –Amelia Burnett, Digital Financial Strategies Director, Infrastructure Policy Advancement at Bentley Systems
The role of infrastructure technology
Infrastructure technology encompasses both digital and non-digital solutions applied throughout an asset’s lifecycle to achieve superior economic, social, or environmental outcomes. When it comes to mobilising private capital, technology serves three vital functions:
- Improving access to data helps stakeholders make better decisions regarding risk management, construction delivery, and carbon optimisation.
- Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets at scale far faster than humans, enhancing long-term decision-making and operational performance.
- Standardised data and frameworks allow investors to compare performance across diverse assets, reducing uncertainty and improving market liquidity.
New research study with the FAST Group
To bridge the gap between technology and capital deployment, a new research initiative was launched by IPA in collaboration with the FAST-Infra Group to explore how infrastructure investors and insurers assess opportunities, risks and sustainability outcomes, as well as the role that infrastructure data and technologies may play in supporting more informed decision-making across the infrastructure lifecycle.
While infrastructure technology is rapidly improving, the market currently lacks empirical evidence to demonstrate its exact use and value to infrastructure investors. This new research project aims to address this gap by carrying out an industry survey and a series of in-depth interviews with investors and insurers.
“So, we have the understanding that the infrastructure data and technology is improving performance, but what we don’t have at the moment is the empirical evidence across the sector as to how it’s actually being used.” –Amelia Burnett, Digital Financial Strategies Director, Infrastructure Policy Advancement at Bentley Systems
The industry survey is live until late August 2026. Stakeholders across the investment, insurance, policy, and engineering sectors are urged to participate to help identify remaining market barriers.
The research will inform a forthcoming white paper, to be titled Digital Roadmaps for Finance and Insurance. The paper will develop practical principles that investors and insurers can use to better articulate future expectations for infrastructure data, reporting, assurance and technology capabilities, with the aim of supporting the mobilisation of private capital into sustainable infrastructure.
Mobilising capital to close the sustainable infrastructure investment gap
The highlight of the session was a lively panel was moderated by Nicola Watkinson, managing director, international at CityUK. It featured Holly Roberts-Harry, sustainable finance solutions lead at Howden Capital Advisory and Placement, Andrew Walton, chief sustainability officer and chief corporate affairs officer at Lloyds Banking Group, Astrid Manroth, head of blended finance at European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and Mark Enzer, a fellow at Mott MacDonald. The discussion drew on distinct, multisector perspectives from:
- Insurance: Assessing risk mitigation and long-term resilience.
- Public sector investment and private banking: How can we structure and blend capital effectively?
- Engineering: How can technology and systems thinking influence decisions around risk and financing?
Ultimately, the focus was on using real-world examples to solve systemic funding shortages and accelerate sustainable development.
“Working in the regulation and policy, we think sometimes we have the least stylish job in the world, trying to fix the environment so that investment can flow more smoothly. But I would say it’s like building the runway. No one goes to the airport to look at the runway, but no planes will land without it. So, it is an important element in all of this, and another way that the private sector can jump in and help to play a role.” –Nicola Watkinson, Managing Director, International, CityUK
The insurance perspective
A significant obstacle in securing capital is that adaptation investments are frequently framed around “avoided losses,” a concept that traditional capital providers find difficult to prioritise. Investors instead demand cash flow stability, downside protection, and predictable returns.
To bridge this divide, the integration of finance and insurance must be addressed through shifting insurance from a late-stage transactional afterthought to an early-stage diagnostic tool.
Advanced digital risk modelling plays a pivotal role in translating physical climate risks into decision-useful financial metrics. By stress-testing assets against acute hazards such as wildfires, hailstorms, and severe weather, modelling can quantify the financial difference between a standard investment case and a resilient investment case.
Although integrating resilience measures increases upfront capital expenditure, it fundamentally strengthens the business case by:
- Reducing loss frequency and severity.
- Dampening earnings volatility and minimising tail risk.
- Improving net present value and risk-adjusted internal rates of return.
- Enhancing credit quality and expanding the eventual investor universe.
To lower the cost of capital and guarantee project insurability, risk management must therefore inform the earliest design phases. This includes evaluating project siting, flood resilience, structural elevation, and the allocation of risk among contractors.
“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been approached when a project’s almost at financial close, and someone goes, ‘huh, let’s think about insurance,’ and at that point it’s far too late. So, getting involved at the earliest stages to help design at the design phase, both to think about is insurance even available, and if it’s not, how do you manage that.” –Holly Roberts-Harry, Sustainable Finance Solutions Lead, Howden Capital Advisory and Placement
The public sector investment perspective
Modern blended finance serves as a sophisticated structuring approach to mobilise private capital. It combines public and private capital using instruments such as concessional loans, public guarantees, capital expenditure grants, and equity to address specific risks that the private sector cannot absorb independently.
A major obstacle in emerging markets is matching financing terms with the realities of projects and assets—in particular from the fact that local commercial banks are often prevented from offering the long-term deals required for infrastructure projects.
Blended finance mitigates this obstacle through mechanisms such as partial risk guarantees and rollover structures, which de-risk refinancing and unlock essential local currency financing. This strategy effectively immunises projects against foreign exchange volatility when revenues are generated locally.
Such risk blending is increasingly applied at the portfolio level through diversified asset funds. Integrating the insurance sector is also emerging as a critical tool to expand risk coverage in volatile markets through partial lending or reinsurance solutions.
However, replication of successful projects remains difficult due to systemic bottlenecks, including:
- Capacity constraints: Local governments frequently lack the resources to design complex private-sector tenders.
- Political and regulatory risks: Shifts in government policy and unstable regulatory frameworks often stall financial closure.
- Fragmented project preparation: A historical reliance on a “transaction-by-transaction” approach increases costs and slows deployment.
Overcoming these barriers requires a systemic approach to deals with standardised project documentation, improved local regulatory capacity, and embedded resilience metrics directly within competitive procurement processes.
“I think the opportunity here is to put packages together that make marginally bankable projects bankable by addressing specific risks that the private sector wouldn’t take on their own, and also by enhancing returns as and when needed.” – Astrid Manroth, Head of Blended Finance, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)
The private banking perspective
The availability of capital is rarely the primary constraint to infrastructure investment; rather, the core challenge lies in structuring finance effectively and sourcing it from the appropriate sectors.
Commercial banks operate on a model that focuses on preserving depositor capital and ensuring long-term repayment. Consequently, determining “bankability” requires them to evaluate projects through a rigorous, long-term commercial lens to assess whether a borrower can maintain the required financial viability over many decades.
This assessment increasingly relies on sophisticated resilience and climate data. Accurate data allows banks to optimise capital allocation and establish confidence in their risk underwriting.
The discussion highlighted several evolving frameworks to successfully scale sustainable projects:
- Public-private partnerships (PPPs): Backed by government grants and sovereign fund guarantees to de-risk complex initiatives such as nuclear programs and large-scale residential energy-efficiency retrofits.
- Place-based approaches: Moving away from a fragmented “project-by-project” approach to investment toward wholesale, regional development.
- Data-driven decision-making: The use of advanced technologies, such as geospatial and scaled connectivity data, helps to bring together large groups of disparate stakeholders and helps to make complex projects commercially viable.
It was noted that such highly customised structures are rarely replicable and demand massive institutional effort. However, this forces commercial institutions to adapt traditional practices to accommodate harder and lower-margin but fundamentally resilient transactions.
“Lending money is an easy bit; getting it back is the hard bit, and for a commercial bank that is there to keep money safe for depositors, that is a fundamental starting point.” –Andrew Walton, Chief Sustainability Officer & Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Lloyds Banking Group
The engineering perspective
The built environment operates as a complex system of systems. This means that risk reduction requires a holistic systems-thinking approach focused on cross-sector outcomes rather than isolated project outputs.
Critical sectors like water, energy, and telecommunications are fundamentally codependent; water systems require energy to pump and energy networks rely on telecom infrastructure to function. Because they serve the same consumer base, optimisation cannot occur in silos; performance of one utility often requires capital investment in an adjacent sector’s assets rather than its own.
The transition to this systems approach requires a shift in investor and developer mindsets to ensure that early-stage investments target genuine systemic deficiencies, preventing capital from being wasted on flawed or redundant developments.
The use of data and digital technologies enables this system-wide oversight to be embedded into projects, specifically through the deployment of digital twins. These models create a continuous, two-way connection between the digital and physical world.
Sensor data flows from the physical asset into the digital model to generate operational insights. These then inform decisions and drive automated or manual actions back in the physical world. Creating an ecosystem of interconnected digital twins enables cross-sector interoperability and allows managers to understand systemic risks more accurately.
As these technologies evolve to incorporate advanced artificial intelligence, strict governance is increasingly required. Ultimately, avoiding unwanted outcomes such as data monopolies or mass surveillance requires a deliberate effort by leadership to ensure that technology is deployed to serve the public good and improve socio-economic and environmental outcomes.
“We want better environmental and socioeconomic outcomes. So if we want something different, then we have to be very, very clear that we want to be using AI for public good, data for public good, digital twins for public good, but I have to say it’s not the default setting, so if we want those good outcomes, we’ve actually got to kind of stand up for it, fight for it.” –Mark Enzer, Fellow, Mott MacDonald
Event partners
Infrastructure Policy Advancement, Bentley Systems’ thought leadership initiative, drives the adoption of digital transformation and data-driven leadership to enhance infrastructure decision-making and delivery. IPA partners with leaders across finance, insurance, industry associations, and government to improve infrastructure outcomes for our communities, supporting smarter decisions, faster approvals, innovative designs, efficient construction methods, and sustainable operations.
TheCityUK is the industry-led body representing UK-based financial and related professional services, an industry that contributes over 12% of the UK’s total economic output, is the largest taxpayer, and employs 1 in 13 workers across the country—two-thirds of whom are based outside London.