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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.
Roads Don't Disappear When Politics Change
Alice opens with a striking reframe: geopolitical headwinds may slow sustainability agendas, but the costs embedded in poorly designed roads: in emissions, in safety failures, in climate damages. They keep accumulating regardless of who is in power. Her central message is urgent: most of the infrastructure we will be living with by 2035 is already built. The decisions being made today, on maintenance, retrofitting, and new procurement standards, are the real leverage point.
Key statistics she cites:
- Around 1 billion people still live more than 2 km from an all-season road, limiting their access to jobs, schools, and healthcare.
- 1.9 million people are killed on roads every year.
- More than a quarter of road and rail infrastructure worldwide is exposed to at least one natural hazard per year, costing an estimated $22 billion annually in resilience expenditure.
Transport Is About Shaping Opportunities
At the heart of the international community's shared vision, Alice argues, is a fundamental reframing: transport systems determine who can reach economic opportunities and who is left behind. The UN Decade on Sustainable Transport implementation plan, published in late 2025, reflects years of converging knowledge from organisations like IRF and SLOCAT around three core levers:
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Redesigning who transport is built for
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Treating road deaths and climate damages as manageable risks rather than unavoidable side effects
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Supporting economic growth with far less waste through smarter data use and digital tools
IRF's Roadmaps for Change: From Vision Papers to Navigation Tools
Alice is the focal point for IRF's commitment to the UN Decade — the Roadmaps for Change initiative endorsed by ORIS, Arup, FIDIC, iRAP, and WWF-US, among others. She is deliberate about what the four thematic roadmaps (Inclusive Roads, Safe Roads, Green Roads, and Efficient & Smart Roads) should and should not be.
Each roadmap targets one outcome that roads must deliver better over the next decade. The green roads roadmap, for instance, covers the full life of a road: not just embodied carbon in construction materials, but how roads enable or discourage emissions over decades, how they withstand climate impacts, and how they interact with biodiversity. Alice stresses these are "living tools" designed to evolve as the sector does.
The Real Barrier to Green Roads: How Projects Are Evaluated
When Nicolas asks Alice to identify the single biggest barrier to green roads, she doesn't say technology or standards. She says project appraisal.
Low-carbon pavement options, climate-resilient drainage designs, and longer-life materials typically cost more upfront but deliver fewer failures over 30–40 years. In most appraisal systems, those long-term benefits are either heavily discounted or treated as non-monetary considerations, which means greener options are eliminated before they even reach procurement. Procurement frameworks then reinforce the problem by locking project teams into lowest-cost compliance, leaving contractors with no incentive to propose more sustainable solutions.
Her one concrete change for the next 12 months: make lifecycle carbon and long-term performance mandatory criteria in road project appraisals. As she puts it: "We don't need new technologies for that. The technologies are there. Just different rules will get it funded, and that changes things dramatically."
The Chain from COP Negotiations to an Actual Road Project
Alice explains the three-step sequence that connects global agreements to on-the-ground practice: NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) embed transport in national climate strategies; climate finance conditionality shapes which projects get funded and on what terms; and standards, guidelines, and capacity-building programs determine how funded projects are actually designed and built. The most underestimated step, she argues, is that third one, which is exactly where IRF operates.
Better Roads and Sustainable Roads Are Not Competing Goals
On navigating IRF's diverse membership, from road agencies in low-income countries focused on basic accessibility, to high-income country authorities managing electrification and AI traffic systems, Alice returns to one principle: the challenge is not disagreement on the destination, but finding pathways that respect different starting points.
Her core argument is that the framing matters enormously. For the longest time, road organisations have treated vehicle throughput as the primary measure of success: wider roads, higher speeds, more capacity. Sustainability can feel like a threat to that logic. IRF's role is to reframe the question.
When roads are evaluated through that lens, performance criteria built around sustainability stop being a philosophical imposition and start being straightforward engineering sense.
Technology as Operational Support, Not Silver Bullet
On digital tools and AI, Alice is pragmatic. She points to real-time traffic management systems in Hong Kong and Singapore as the kind of technology that deserves wider global adoption: by optimising existing roads through AI-based detection, speed management, and dynamic rerouting, these cities have significantly reduced congestion and emissions without building new capacity.
She frames AI not as a transformation in itself, but as a tool that makes transport systems more preventive than reactive. And that shift is where the sustainability gains lie.
Resources & Links Mentioned
International Road Federation
- IRF Vision 2030 Strategy: "Sustainable Roads for People and Planet"
- IRF "Roadmaps for Change" — UN Decade on Sustainable Transport commitment
- Endorsing entities: Arup, FIDIC, iRAP, ORIS, WWF-US, Australia NTRO, Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety
UN Decade on Sustainable Transport
- UN Decade on Sustainable Transport 2026–2035 Implementation Plan (available at un.org)
SLOCAT Partnership
Frameworks & Agreements Referenced
- Paris Agreement (10th anniversary, 2025)
- Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) — UNFCCC process
- Multilateral Development Banks (MDB) climate finance conditionality
Digital Traffic Management References
- Hong Kong and Singapore real-time traffic management systems
