Climate-Resilient Infrastructure as a Public Good: Welfare, Risk, and Climate-Smart Growth

Climate change has emerged as a defining global crisis, with the frequency and intensity of climate-induced disasters rising sharply and imposing disproportionate costs on developing economies and small island states. This article examines the role of climate-resilient infrastructure as a central pillar of climate-smart growth, integrating mitigation, adaptation, and long-term development objectives. It situates climate-resilient infrastructure within a planetary health setting, emphasizing the interdependence between human well-being, ecological systems, and infrastructure resilience. Climate-resilient infrastructure, not merely seen as an engineering solution but as a public good that generates significant positive externalities, reduces systemic macroeconomic risk and delivers welfare gains that exceed private financial returns. It discusses the cross-country heterogeneities in resilience outcomes, driven by differences in geographic exposure, economic capacity, institutional quality, and political economy constraints. Building on this, the study advances a welfare-based approach to infrastructure prioritization that incorporates service disruptions, distributional impacts, and fiscal risk, rather than asset values alone. It further outlines policy and financing strategies to bridge the gap between social and private returns, including public investment, concessional finance, blended instruments, and nature-based solutions. By embedding infrastructure within a planetary health lens, the paper argues that resilient systems are critical not only for safeguarding lives and livelihoods, but also for sustaining ecological stability, reducing health risks, and enabling inclusive, sustainable, and climate-smart economic growth.