Global Bank Group support to infrastructure is accompanied by dramatic changes in the external environment. Eight trends in particular have been affecting, and will continue to affect, the way infrastructure services are planned, financed, and operated:

• Climate change;
• The globalization of trade and services;
• The growing regional disparities in the context of rapid urbanization and decentralization;
• Changing global financial conditions, including increases in private investment in infrastructure in emerging markets;
• An increasingly complex global aid architecture;
• Rising energy prices;
• Potential breakthroughs in technologies for delivering infrastructure services in a more sustainable manner; and
• The food prices crisis. 

These global trends, together with the still large infrastructure service delivery gaps—884 million people without access to safe water, 1.6 billion without electricity, and 2.5 billion without sanitation and the estimated one billion people without easy access to an all- weather road —caused the Global Bank Group to analyze its role in infrastructure.