Sustainable Infrastructure

iRAP, the International Road Assessment Programme, is a charity that gives engineers and road agencies free tools to star-rate road safety and plan improvements. Its CEO, Greg Smith, started as a traffic engineer in Sydney local government and now leads a global team working in more than 130 countries. In this conversation with Nicolas Miravalls, co-founder and CEO of ORIS, he explains why road de...

Buro Happold designs some of the world's most ambitious city developments. From London's dense, centuries-old core to blank-canvas megaprojects in Saudi Arabia, its infrastructure teams sit at the point where climate resilience, mobility and carbon targets stop being separate conversations and become one design brief. Rainier Valcarcel has spent twenty years in that brief. He started his career in...

Susanna Zammataro became CEO of FIDIC, the International Federation of Consulting Engineers, a year ago, arriving from 18 years building global road safety data at the International Road Federation. In this episode, she talks with Nicolas Miravalls about FIDIC's carbon management ecosystem, the shift toward multi-criteria procurement with the multilateral development banks, and why she believes AI...

Louis Bettini grew up on a cattle station 60 kilometres from the nearest town, studied commerce, and spent the last 15 years leading sustainability at one of the world's largest road agencies, Main Roads Western Australia. He chairs PIARC Technical Committee 4.5 on Decarbonisation of Road Construction and Maintenance. In this conversation with Renaud de Montaignac, Louis talks through Western Aust...

Davide Lo Presti started his career with a bag of crumb rubber and a PhD question: could waste tyre material be meaningfully integrated into asphalt? Twenty years later, he is leading the SMARTI Lab at the University of Palermo, chairing RoadLCA — the International Symposium on Pavement and Bridge Life Cycle Assessment — and watching the research he began in Nottingham become mandatory in Italian...

In this episode of Sustainable Infrastructure, we sit down with Marta Bouchard, Sustainability Solutions Director at Autodesk. Marta shares her journey from sustainability consultant to technology leader, and why she made the switch: impact at scale. We explore how Autodesk built an open partner ecosystem to bring carbon measurement directly into the tools engineers already use, and why no single...

In this episode of Sustainable Infrastructure, I sit down with Andreas Linnet, the Global Decarbonization Lead for Infrastructure at Ramboll. Andreas shares his journey into the world of decarbonization and discusses the pivotal role engineers play in optimizing design for sustainability. We delve into the importance of early carbon quantification in project planning, and how setting clear targets...

Welcome to Episode 3 of Sustainable Infrastructure, the ORIS podcast where engineers, policymakers, and construction leaders share how the world can build infrastructure fit for the environmental and social challenges of the 21st century. Our guest is Alice Yiu, Head of Advocacy and Outreach at the International Road Federation (IRF), a Geneva-based not-for-profit representing the global road comm...

Most infrastructure companies say they care about carbon. But how many actually measure it at the design stage? And of those who measure, how many actually act on the data? David Orr has spent the last three years answering these questions at global scale. As Product Lead for Mott MacDonald's Moata Carbon Portal, he has watched the platform grow from serving a handful of transport projects to supp...

In this inaugural episode of Sustainable Infrastructure, I sit down with Costanzo Graffi, Europe Contractors Partnership Lead at AECOM. We delve into the pressing need for the construction industry to embrace sustainability, exploring how early decisions can significantly reduce carbon footprints in infrastructure projects. Costanzo shares insights on AECOM's ambitious goal of halving carbon emiss...