Executive director Savina Carluccio writes nature-positivity into engineers’ brief

Infrastructure could serve as a key leverage point for nature recovery by embracing the principles of nature positive engineering (NPE).

This is one of the findings of The Foresight of Nature-Positive Engineering, a new report from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, in partnership with the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI).

ESG Global recently spoke with Savina Carluccio, the report’s author and executive director of the ICSI, asking her three clever questions about coastal and marine environments, implementation bottlenecks and engineers becoming stewards of natural systems.

The report outlines three key accelerants: creating an enabling policy environment, leveraging technology for procurement and building technical capacity. In your experience, where does the real implementation bottleneck sit today?

The implementation bottleneck is systemic and multifaceted, but the critical issue is that nature-positivity is not yet standard in the engineer’s brief. Infrastructure projects still prioritise conventional performance metrics, such as cost, efficiency, safety and compliance, whilst ecological outcomes are often treated as secondary or optional. This is reinforced by:

• Enabling environments that favour traditional infrastructure approaches, including policy and regulatory frameworks that overlook nature-positive requirements and financing mechanisms that fail to adequately value ecosystem services.
• The absence of consistent benchmarks and clear standards, causing projects to be seen as experimental rather than replicable.
• A disconnect where engineers lack structured tools to incorporate nature into engineering decision-making processes.

The challenge isn’t merely technical capacity or enabling environment, it’s that all key accelerants must work together to create systemic change. As already mentioned above, without procurement and permitting requiring nature-positive outcomes, engineers won’t prioritise them regardless of their technical capacity.

How do you see current engineers making the shift to becoming “stewards of natural systems”?

There are several complementary pathways to making this shift:

• Transforming education: Current academic curricula tend to prioritise technical content, often neglecting environmental, economic, and social dimensions as well as the cross-disciplinary skills essential for Nature-positive Engineering (NPE). The shift requires integrating ecology fundamentals into engineering degrees and weaving systems thinking, anticipatory planning, and strategic foresight into the fabric of engineering education rather than treating sustainability as an add-on.
• Upskilling professionals: Engineers must acquire technical, behavioural, and cross-sectoral skills including ecological principles, natural capital accounting and valuation, design of NbS and green-grey infrastructure solutions, climate mitigation and adaptation, sustainable resource management and life cycle assessments Upskilling efforts through continuing professional development programmes, online courses, and real-world case studies are emerging as critical tools to bridge knowledge gaps, with professional certifications incentivising upskilling and standardising industry knowledge.
• Developing standards, tools and guidance: Engineers need comprehensive, lifecycle-based frameworks that identify clear entry points for NPE approaches within engineering decision-making processes and existing policy structures. This includes engineering manuals of practice for nature-based infrastructure solutions, standardised methods to assess future connected nature-climate-health risks and trade-offs, and practical guidance for planning, designing, implementing, monitoring and maintaining NPE solutions. Without these structured tools and recognised standards, nature-positive approaches will continue to be perceived as experimental rather than as replicable, proven engineering practice.
• Shifting mindsets: Critically, NPE requires a fundamental shift from viewing nature as an expendable resource or obstacle to recognising it as a partner and ally, with nature positivity becoming a core objective of engineering alongside safety, efficiency, and functionality.

This transformation can’t rest on engineers alone. It requires clients and decision-makers demanding nature-positive solutions, which is why the responsibility for upskilling extends beyond engineers to include policymakers, regulators, investors, and the general public.

What is the single most important financial or contractual mechanism that ICSI is currently pushing for to ensure that nature-positive engineering in coastal and marine environments is the most profitable option?

Rather than a single mechanism being most important, it is a broader financial strategy which entails evolving natural capital risk assessment frameworks that help redirect capital flows to nature-positive infrastructure while better accounting for long-term risks to asset value. The goal is to make nature-positive approaches profitable by ensuring that the financial consequences of not investing in nature, such as ecosystem degradation, disaster vulnerability, and reduced climate resilience, factored into economic analyses and decision frameworks.

Additionally, integrating biodiversity outcomes into procurement processes is a critical lever. Procurement processes for infrastructure should establish biodiversity enhancement as a core requirement rather than an optional consideration, including mandatory evaluation criteria that reward proposals demonstrating measurable ecological improvements.