ESG in Giga Projects: Building Sustainability Into the Project DNA

André Choma is a project strategist with over 25 years of experience leading capital projects in construction, infrastructure, and logistics. As a Director at Deloitte, he helps organizations enhance value delivery through integrated planning, stakeholder alignment, and embedded governance. He hosts the Capital Projects Podcast, a leading platform that features global project leaders, and serves as the Global Lead of the Gigaprojects Circle at the PMO Global Alliance Community. A certified PMP® and PMI-RMP®, André also trains professionals in the FEL Methodology, empowering teams to bridge strategy and execution and build projects that create long-term social and environmental value.

  Construction   Giga Projects   Organizational Culture   PMO   Sustainability  

Introduction: A New Era of Accountability
Those multi-billion-dollar, multi-year initiatives—known as giga projects—that reshape entire regions have always stood out due to their size and complexity. In today’s world, they are increasingly in the spotlight. That’s not only for becoming more common, but also for the scale of their environmental and social impact.

It’s clear that the larger the project, the larger the impact on the local environment and society. The construction of new railways, roads, hydroelectric dams, mining or oil & gas facilities…all will modify their surroundings, forever! Tens of thousands of workers will be mobilized for construction over two or more years, disrupting local routines; trucks will operate 24 hours a day; and millions of cubic meters of earth will be moved. These impacts must be outweighed by the long-term benefits generated for society.

Projects like High Speed 2 and the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in the UK; the new hydroelectric complex in southeastern Tibet; the GCC railway in the Persian Gulf region; and the NEOM Project in Saudi Arabia draw attention due to their massive scale. They can represent either significant impacts or proportional benefits for the societies in which they are embedded.

As expectations rise, project leaders must respond. Environmental, social and governance (…

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