In September 2025 I moved from Singapore to Paris to run the secretariat of FAST-Infra Group, the non-profit association that owns the FAST-Infra Sustainable Infrastructure Label. A little over a year in, this is a short account of what that work has actually involved, written mostly for the people who ask me what a “label for infrastructure” is for.
The short answer is that it is a shared definition of quality. A project that meets the Label’s criteria across environmental, social, governance and resilience dimensions has been assessed against a single framework built on more than a hundred international sources, rather than against whichever questionnaire each lender happens to use. For a developer that means one assessment instead of five. For a bank or an insurer it means a comparable signal across a pipeline. Most of my year has been spent putting that argument in front of the institutions that could act on it.
Development banks first. At COP30 in Belém we ran a session at the IDFC Pavilion on how standards help public development banks unlock private capital, and in June 2026 we followed it with a webinar for the IDFC climate working group, hosted with AFD, that walked the Club’s members through what the Label would mean inside their own portfolios. In between came the Finance in Common Summit in Paris, where coordination around shared standards was, for once, front and centre. The IDFC’s members together provide around USD 4 trillion in public development and climate finance a year; if they converge on a common assessment, the rest of the market tends to follow.
Governments and industry bodies next. With the French Treasury we convened a webinar in April on sustainable infrastructure financing in Moldova, framed within the G20/OECD quality infrastructure agenda, and we presented the initiative to Syntec Ingénierie and the Syndicat des énergies renouvelables, the federations representing France’s engineering and renewable energy companies. At PPP Week in Istanbul the Blue Dot Network and the FAST-Infra Label shared a stage for the first time, which matters because the two schemes are complementary and the market needs to hear that from both sides at once.
Resilience and insurability have become the thread that runs through everything. In May we took part in the World Bank Group’s thematic session on resilient infrastructure in Paris, co-organised with AXA Climate, where the IFC and GIF published new evidence that every dollar invested in infrastructure resilience returns about four. In June, at London Climate Action Week with Pinsent Masons, a room of investors and insurers worked through what it would take to price physical climate risk properly. The missing piece is not appetite; it is a common language between project preparation and underwriting. That is what our session at Paris InfraWeek on 2 November, co-hosted with the Africa Infrastructure Fellowship Programme, is designed to address.
And the numbers, because a label has to show adoption, not just goodwill. In the first half of 2026, 146 projects across eleven countries, worth around USD 15 billion, completed a self-assessment against the Label, and Version 2.0 of the framework was launched. The International Trade Centre added the Label to its Standards Map, the UN and WTO database used to compare voluntary sustainability standards. KPMG Middle East partnered with us to support adoption across the Gulf. And in October, Proparco and Bankers without Boundaries joined FAST-Infra Group as members, bringing a development finance lender and a specialist adviser on green capital into the coalition.
None of this is glamorous, and almost none of it is attributable to one person; a secretariat’s job is to make other institutions’ decisions easier. But after a decade spent on the research and investor side of sustainable infrastructure, running the standard itself has been a useful change of vantage point. The next months bring the OECD Infrastructure Forum, where the draft High-Level Principles on quality and responsible infrastructure are under consultation, and COP31 in Antalya. I will write about both.