Bridging the Investment - Delivery Gap: 5 Critical Questions for Sustainable Success

‘Price is what you pay, value is what you get’  Warren Buffet

Achieving our climate goals requires trillions of dollars annually by 2030. But delaying investment will cost us trillions more to address a wide range of climate change impacts. Our world isn’t designed for for these future challenges, and interconnected issues like carbon reduction, resilience, and nature recovery will make the redesign of our world complex and costly.

Yet this situation is worsened by a misalignment between the investment and delivery spheres. Investors and delivery teams aren’t fully accounting for each other’s operational realities. Fiscal frameworks, intended to protect and guide effective investment, may counter the long-term sustainable investment needed to prevent major catastrophic impacts downstream. Sustainable finance volume, while growing, varies significantly globally. Misalignment risks reducing the impact of this investment still further.

Systems thinking is crucial for framing solutions capable of addressing multifaceted climate challenges. Yet adoption remains fragmented between investment and delivery supply chains risking underperformance. Overcoming this fragmentation is a critical challenge. At AtkinsRéalis we boil this down to ‘how do we design in resilience, design out carbon and drive down cost’ on every project. This is simple to say but involves complex trade-offs that demands strong alignment between delivery and investment objectives and metrics for success to ensure outcomes are not compromised.

Notwithstanding the need for stable policy environments and other global incentives such as carbon pricing, here are 5 critical questions that highlight key areas where we can come together, stay together, and work together today to overcome silos and drive success for sustainable outcomes.

1) How do we align the project delivery ecosystem’s range of incentives to deliver long term, systems based sustainability goals?

→ Challenge the collective mindset from the beginning, align strategic objectives, and make them consistently measurable across the whole delivery ecosystem

Mindset influences every aspect of a project. Existing financial instruments often focus on short-term returns focusing on CAPEX rather than long-term sustainability, disconnecting upfront investment from long-term operational goals. To compound this, the project delivery sphere, heavily influenced by CAPEX, rarely prioritises OPEX, TOTEX or whole-life performance unless contractually required. There are exceptions but those examples remain outliers.

ESG metrics often miss specific operational realities, or the granular detail that influence key decisions through the design, construction, and operation of assets and infrastructure. As climate events start to impact assets within a single investment cycle, this should start to affect the Weighted Average Cost of Capital. The standards we use to measure ESG and resilience must speak directly to risk— both physical and transitional —if they are to be effective. Managing risk is therefore key with roles for the insurance sector, alongside the investment and delivery communities, to be elevated in our efforts.

Developing consistent sustainability metrics and embedding them in outcome- or performance-based contracts is key. Standards like BREEAM, LEED, and Envision already act as sustainability indicators by providing clearer targets, but they are regionally nuanced, front-loaded, and don’t guarantee performance after assets are built. We must better organise the supply and value chains around real world delivery challenges via better structured contracting vehicles. Importantly, adopting these integrated models early drives collaboration and initiates innovation where it has the most impact - at the start.

2) How do we widen collaboration across the whole delivery ecosystem to build understanding and drive innovation?

→ Simple. We recognize the value that different ends of the delivery ecosystem can bring to each other and work together systematically from the start

While collaboration is common, it’s not systematic - especially between investment and delivery at scale. Frameworks like PAS2080 help operationalize system thinking, together with models like Enterprise and Alliancing. However, we need more systematic collaboration between investors, project proponents, and their delivery supply chains, or risk losing valuable perspectives.

We must left- and right-shift knowledge-sharing across the whole delivery ecosystem. Financing models must engage the entire supply chain during planning and design to align on long-term sustainability goals, helping to structure collaborative and performance or outcome based contracting vehicles.

3) How do we address the reporting overload, drive standardisation, and ensure stronger enforcement of reporting and accountability?

→ We should report less and do more demonstrable improvement work.

Despite the rise of green bonds and sustainability-linked finance, enforcement of sustainability promises remains limited. Green bonds often lack robust monitoring, reporting, and independent verification during construction and operation. During delivery, CAPEX-focused decisions, like value engineering, can unintentionally divert projects from their sustainable objectives.

There’s also a risk of framework and guidance overload. Numerous competing frameworks like GRI, SASB, and CDP generate inconsistency and repetitive disclosures. This can lead to prioritising regulatory compliance and box-ticking over substantive change - and spending more on reporting than on implementation.

Standards for different asset classes and regions (e.g., PAS2080, BREEAM, LEED) often overlap but don’t necessarily align with investor frameworks. To address this, we need standardised and/or aligned reporting frameworks and effective monitoring and verification protocols better connecting the whole delivery ecosystem.

4) How do we ensure data driven and informed decision making is consistent across the project delivery ecosystem and not hiding underperformance?

→ Align the wider delivery ecosystems data acquisition and data strategies, and enable data-driven decision making

Investment and delivery groups often use data differently: investors tend to focus on portfolio level insights, delivery teams on detailed asset level data and technical insights. If the frameworks, data, and methods for assessing investment performance are not well aligned, our understanding of its impact will be limited - reducing confidence in decision-making.

AI introduces additional risks. Overreliance on opaque ‘black box’ solutions can generate mistrust, while overly transparent ‘glass box’ solutions may draw excessive scrutiny. Balancing these approaches as they evolve across the delivery ecosystem is crucial for effective adoption, scaling, and measurement. This ensures consistent data collection, management, visualisation and usage, allowing for accurate performance comparisons across the delivery ecosystem.

5) How can our sectors increase capacity to push the agenda further and faster and increase the certainty of delivering the desired outcomes?

→ By embracing all the points above and moving towards a coordinated and integrated project delivery ecosystem with a clear mission for change.

The pressing issue of capacity—skills, understanding, and strategic resources—is crucial in addressing our challenges. By fostering long-term, collaborative mindsets, standardising for scale, and embedding these principles through data strategies, we can expand capacity across sectors. These behaviours reduce risk and increase momentum, attracting talent, investment, and partnerships. This virtuous cycle attracts more investment, raises standards, and reinvests lessons learned into future projects driving an industrial scale approach to continuous improvement.

To kickstart this cycle, we need organisations that bridge investment and program teams, who understand both sides and their respective frameworks. AtkinsRéalis is committed to integration, with cross-disciplinary expertise and lifecycle experience, making us natural partners for uniting industries.

True systems thinking approaches can deliver value across multiple vectors, enabling investors to have a significant impact. In turn, this would help to assure the sustainable outcomes that all stakeholders want, and that the wider world desperately needs.