Infrastructure funding gap growing | Global cities flourishing and floundering | America's EV and gas tax fees rising

The world's infrastructure funding gap is growing, stressed by rising interest rates, the fight against climate change, and waves of populism.

Despite infrastructure's outsized impact on global carbon emissions (the sector is responsible for nearly 80 percent of them) there remains an enormous investment gap between the funds that G20 nations have pledged and what's needed for them to reach their sustainable development goals (like the commitments in Paris to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius). It's a two-pronged problem of scale and speed - infrastructure takes years to develop and its impacts are difficult to diffuse in the same way as, say, deploying a new piece of software or other digital technology.

For these reasons, the G20 group of nations' Global Infrastructure Hub (GIH), which tracks funding, reckons the gap has tripled in less than a decade, from $700M in 2017 to over $3T today. GIH points specifically to the demands of post-COVID recovery, the war in Ukraine, and governments' new self-imposed climate goals as primary drivers. Troublingly the gap exists despite a whopping $3.2T in committed post-pandemic public infrastructure spending. But there are some promising tailwinds that could eventually help to improve the situation.