Show Notes
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 community across 118+ countries. Before joining IRF in 2025, Alice spent more than a decade at the SLOCAT Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport, where she represented the transport sector at UN Climate Summits and led the development of landmark Transport and Climate Status Reports. In this conversation with Nicolas Miravalls, co-founder and CEO of ORIS, Alice maps the full chain of influence, from Paris Agreement pledges to nationally determined contributions, down to project appraisals, procurement rules, and the standards engineers work with every day. She also unpacks IRF's Roadmaps for Change commitment under the UN Decade on Sustainable Transport, which ORIS is proud to support as an endorsing entity. The episode covers the barriers to green roads (spoiler: it's less about technology, more about how projects are evaluated), how IRF builds consensus across a membership that spans road agencies managing two-lane rural roads and city authorities piloting AI-based traffic management, and why Alice believes sustainability should be framed as practical problem solving, not philosophy.
More from 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 design matters more than driver blame, how far the UN road safety decade has really got, and what happens when AI helps rate roads at scale.
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.
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 adoption should start with governance, not tools. The honest takeaway: none of it works until the industry values its own expertise properly.
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 Australia's trickle-down procurement model for decarbonisation, a data-driven approach to network vulnerability assessment, six priority circular materials from recycled asphalt to green steel, and the relationship skills that make any of it work inside a large public organisation. His closing advice: take the first step. Reach out. You don't know what response you'll get.
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 procurement law. This episode covers the full arc: what it takes to move sustainable materials research into industry practice, why road authorities are the real lever of change, how to train engineers who think in lifecycles from day one, and what comes after carbon accounting. One honest takeaway: the tipping point is not a moment. It is a generation.