Durvesh Ganveer, head of sustainability business, NTT DATA UK & Ireland looks at a data-defined future for infrastructure.
Sustainable infrastructure now sits at the centre of economic and industrial strategy across the UK and Europe. Governments are committing unprecedented levels of capital to modernise energy systems, strengthen transport networks, upgrade utilities, and improve the resilience of critical national infrastructure.
Following the UK government’s Spring Statement and the launch of its 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy, ministers reaffirmed plans for a long-term infrastructure pipeline worth around £725 billion. The scale of its ambition reflects both the urgency of modernising national infrastructure and the need to deliver assets capable of supporting long-term economic growth.
At the same time, financial markets are evolving rapidly. Sustainable and net-zero transition finance are scaling, with banks, pension funds, and institutional investors increasingly directing capital toward projects aligned with net-zero objectives. However, expectations are changing. The focus is no longer simply on funding infrastructure – it is on funding verifiable net-zero infrastructure that can demonstrate measurable outcomes across design, construction, operations, and supply chains.
For infrastructure leaders, this creates a new challenge. The primary constraint is no longer capital availability, but credibility.
Infrastructure is not yet data-ready for net zero
Despite strong ambition, many infrastructure projects today are not equipped to consistently measure, manage, and prove sustainability performance across the full asset lifecycle. Sustainability reporting often presents a simplified, high-level view of progress, but beneath this sits a more complex operational reality: fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult-to-verify data.
For project owners, contractors, engineering teams and operators, this creates a significant delivery challenge. Decisions relating to materials, procurement, energy use, carbon reduction, and operational efficiency are frequently made using disconnected datasets spread across multiple systems and stakeholders.
The consequences extend far beyond reporting. When infrastructure decisions are being made using incomplete, inconsistent or unverifiable data, they become a delivery, investment and operational risk issue.
The three structural barriers to credible net-zero delivery
At the core of this challenge are three structural barriers that continue to undermine reliable sustainability outcomes across infrastructure projects.
The first is data fragmentation across the asset lifecycle. Infrastructure programmes generate vast volumes of information across design, engineering, procurement, construction, operations, and maintenance. Yet these datasets typically remain isolated within separate systems – engineering platforms, ERP environments, contractor spreadsheets, operational technologies, and ESG reporting tools – without a unified structure.
For delivery teams, this creates practical problems. Carbon impacts identified during design are not always visible during construction. Operational performance data may not link back to original design assumptions. Supplier and subcontractor information often arrives in inconsistent formats. Without integrated data, organisations struggle to maintain a consistent lifecycle view of emissions, resilience, cost, and performance.
The second barrier is methodological inconsistency. Even where data exists, organisations frequently calculate sustainability metrics using different standards, assumptions, and methodologies. Scope 3 emissions are particularly difficult to assess consistently due to variable supplier data quality and the use of estimation models. Embodied carbon calculations can differ across materials, regions, and engineering approaches, while baseline definitions often vary between project stakeholders.
For infrastructure decision-makers, this makes benchmarking and investment prioritisation extremely difficult. Projects may appear comparable at headline level while being measured using fundamentally different assumptions.
The third, and most critical, barrier is the presence of assurance gaps. Much of today’s sustainability data lacks traceability back to source inputs. Calculations are often opaque, and reported outputs are rarely connected to a clear evidence trail.
This matters because sustainability disclosures are increasingly being scrutinised in the same way as financial reporting. Asset owners, investors, regulators, and lenders now require confidence that reported sustainability outcomes can be verified, audited, and defended.
From data gaps to capital and delivery risk
When data is incomplete or inconsistent, risks are misrepresented, decisions are distorted, and capital can be misallocated.
A widely cited example illustrates this clearly. A data-deficient assessment of a 900-kilometre highway project in the Amazon concluded that it would result in zero net increase in deforestation. In contrast, a more comprehensive, data-intensive analysis projected up to 39 million hectares of forest loss by 2050. The difference was not a matter of interpretation, but of data completeness and methodological rigour.
For infrastructure stakeholders, the lesson is clear. If the underlying data is flawed, then the decisions built upon it are equally unreliable.
Projects may appear aligned with net-zero pathways while embedding significant unaccounted emissions, supply chain impacts, or operational inefficiencies. Investors face exposure to stranded assets and greenwashing risk. Project sponsors risk delays, cost escalation, financing challenges, and increasing regulatory scrutiny.
What appears to be a technical data issue is, in reality, a project delivery and capital allocation issue.
Regulation is raising the bar
Regulatory expectations are also changing rapidly. Across the UK and EU, frameworks such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the UK’s Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR), and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) are pushing sustainability reporting toward audit-grade standards.
Organisations are increasingly expected to demonstrate not only what they report, but how those figures were generated, validated, and assured.
For infrastructure programmes, this means sustainability data must become standardised and verifiable across the entire asset lifecycle. Delivery organisations, operators, and supply chain partners will increasingly need to provide evidence-based reporting that can withstand investor, regulatory, and public scrutiny.
The missing layer: a unified digital backbone
Addressing these challenges requires a unified digital backbone capable of integrating, standardising, and validating sustainability data across infrastructure ecosystems.
Such a backbone must connect information across design, construction, operations, and supply chains while establishing clear data lineage and governance.
Critically, it must provide three core capabilities.
First, traceability – enabling every reported metric to be linked back to source inputs and operational data.
Second, standardisation – ensuring that sustainability metrics are calculated consistently across projects, contractors, suppliers, and operators.
Third, verifiability – allowing outputs to meet audit, regulatory, and investor expectations.
Without this foundation, net-zero commitments risk remaining aspirational rather than operationally achievable.
Why this is now achievable
Until recently, delivering this level of integration across infrastructure ecosystems was extremely difficult. However, advances in digital technologies are now making this possible at scale.
IoT-enabled infrastructure is generating real-time operational and asset performance data across transport, utilities, buildings, and industrial systems. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence - including generative AI - are enabling organisations to structure and analyse large volumes of previously inaccessible unstructured data, including engineering documents, supplier records, maintenance logs, and contracts.
Combined with modern data platforms, these capabilities enable organisations to connect previously fragmented datasets into a coherent and decision-grade environment.
Importantly, the value does not come from individual technologies in isolation. It comes from creating an integrated operational and sustainability data environment capable of supporting better engineering, delivery, investment, and operational decisions.
From reporting to decision intelligence
The opportunity extends far beyond compliance reporting. With integrated lifecycle data in place, infrastructure organisations can move from retrospective reporting toward forward-looking decision intelligence.
Advanced modelling techniques allow engineering and delivery teams to assess how design choices, construction methods, material selection, and operational strategies influence emissions and asset performance over time. Scenario analysis can evaluate the long-term impact of decisions made during planning and delivery, including downstream operational effects.
This enables sustainability to become an active design and investment variable rather than a reporting exercise conducted after delivery.
For infrastructure leaders, this creates the ability to optimise projects not only for cost and schedule, but also for carbon, resilience, operational efficiency, and long-term asset value.
Unlocking capital and improving delivery confidence
For investors and lenders, improved sustainability data integrity delivers tangible benefits. Better visibility into lifecycle performance and risk supports more accurate pricing, stronger confidence in disclosures, and faster access to sustainable finance mechanisms.
For project sponsors and operators, integrated sustainability data can improve governance, reduce regulatory exposure, strengthen stakeholder trust, and support more effective programme delivery.
Importantly, it also enables stronger collaboration across infrastructure ecosystems. When asset owners, contractors, engineering partners, suppliers, and investors operate from a shared and auditable understanding of sustainability performance, decision-making becomes faster, risks become clearer, and accountability improves.
In this environment, the digital backbone becomes more than a reporting capability. It becomes a critical enabler of infrastructure delivery, operational resilience, and capital mobilisation.
A data-defined future for infrastructure
As the transition to net zero accelerates, infrastructure will increasingly be judged not only by what is built, but by how effectively its environmental and operational impacts can be measured, managed, and verified across its full lifecycle.
To succeed, organisations must recognise data as foundational infrastructure in its own right.
By establishing the right digital backbone, they will not only improve sustainability reporting, but also strengthen project delivery, operational performance, investment confidence, and long-term resilience.
In an environment where credibility increasingly determines investment, data integrity is rapidly becoming the backbone of sustainable infrastructure itself.