Toby Kent, chief executive of the Infrastructure Sustainability Council, has worked in a range of appointments in sustainability and resilience for most of his career after leaving the London School of Economics, including City of Melbourne and ANZ Bank.
But it’s in the world of infrastructure that his skills and commitment to sustainability will be most acutely tested. This sector should by rights be buildings-adjacent, and yet it’s an industry with such different scale and dynamics that it can surprise.
The biggest difference is in the amount of carbon emissions that it can push into the atmosphere…or avoided. Roads, bridges, airports, rail and even communications systems are the big ticket items that the ISC works with. Today data centres have joined that group, including the hugely intensive hyperscalers.
But as Kent points out, this is a sector that throughout human history has been at the “pinnacle of human ambition and what we can achieve.”
“It is both what we rely on each and every day, as well as what we create to really help us go further in our lives.”
The Roman aqueducts come to mind. But Kent also points to the Budj Bim eel trap system in western Victoria that is more than 10,000 years old.
So, a public good that pulls society out of subsistence living. We get that. But don’t we now have enough infrastructure, especially given the enormous volume of emissions it can produce?
That’s a moot point. But Kent points out that a rated infrastructure project can save 40 per cent of carbon emissions compared to a regular project.
In 2025, about 26 projects were assessed; “certainly not enough”.
But progress is absolutely happening. InfraBuild, for instance, has reduced carbon intensity in its most sustainable steel products by about 60 per cent, and Holcim and Boral have reduced it to around 50 per cent.
