Five well-attended parallel sessions took place on the afternoon of Tuesday 15 September at FIDIC’s Global Infrastructure Conference 2026, ranging across the digital, environmental, social and governance questions increasingly shaping how infrastructure gets planned, financed and delivered.
Technology and Innovation in Infrastructure Delivery
Moderating the session, Tina Karlberg, president of Sweco International, opened by putting a myth to rest – that digital tools in the industry are no longer a future promise. Building Information Modelling is now used on roughly two-thirds of construction projects worldwide, Karlberg told delegates, with more than half of new projects running on cloud-based platforms that let teams on different continents work on the same live model. The real question, she argued, is not adoption but readiness – many organisations are bolting cutting-edge digital collaboration onto legacy systems and processes still built around spreadsheets, while the legal and contractual questions around data ownership and liability inside a shared digital model have not always kept pace with the technology itself.
Koray Ateş of Yuksel Proje addressed how digital capability is factoring into how infrastructure projects are now tendered and won internationally. Pier Nicola Currà, an architect and founder of his own Italian practice, spoke to how digital tooling is changing the creative and technical design process itself, not just project coordination around it. Neusa Ingles of AAPC Angola offered a counterpoint on what digital transformation realistically looks like in markets where connectivity and investment in tools lag behind more digitally mature peers.
Nature-Positive Infrastructure
Moderating the session, Natalie Muir, regional director for water at Stantec Australia and vice chair of FIDIC’s Sustainable Development Committee, was precise about the bar the session’s title sets – “nature-positive” is a genuinely higher standard than “sustainable” or “low-impact,” meaning infrastructure that leaves biodiversity and ecosystems measurably better off than before construction began. Muir pointed to FIDIC's playbook for nature-positive infrastructure development, built jointly with WWF and AECOM and now including a chapter on procurement, alongside free training delivered through the FIDIC Academy. She told delegates that global investment into nature-based solutions needs to roughly double to meet climate, biodiversity and land-degradation goals together, even as far more private capital still flows toward activities that damage nature than toward restoring it.
Evan Freund of WWF addressed which financial mechanisms and investor incentives are actually starting to close that gap. Dipankar Ghose of WWF-India and Ravi Singh, secretary general and CEO of WWF India, spoke to what nature-positive planning realistically looks like set against the scale and pace of India’s own infrastructure development. Mandakini Karki of ST Consulting Engineers in Nepal addressed what nature-positive design requires differently across Himalayan terrain and river systems compared with lower-altitude, more urbanised markets. Louis Downing of the Global Infrastructure Basel Foundation spoke to why nature is not yet featuring well enough in tender applications, and to the FAST-Infra initiative’s role in moving the industry from concept to action.
Sustainable Transport for People and Prosperity
Moderating the session, Irakli Khergiani, a FIDIC board member and president of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Georgia, framed transport infrastructure as both an economic multiplier and a safety and equity issue. Khergiani told delegates that Asia-Pacific is home to well over half the world’s population and nearly half its GDP, yet holds less than a third of global road infrastructure, while road deaths worldwide, though down by more than a fifth over the past decade and a half, still claim well over a million lives a year.
Gonzalo Alcaraz of the International Road Federation addressed the biggest lever for closing the connectivity gap while also improving safety outcomes. Gilbert Arasa, Kenya’s roads secretary, spoke to what his country's experience shows about translating road investment into genuine economic and social benefit for underserved rural communities. Paola Grossi of Speri Spa addressed how project design changes when sustainability and safety are treated as core requirements rather than add-ons. Ali Ipinge, CEO of Namibia's Road Fund Administration, spoke to what is and is not working about dedicated, ring-fenced road-funding mechanisms as a model other countries might learn from.
Building Capacity for Carbon Management
Moderating the session, Basma Eissa, FIDIC’s head of policy, ESG and sustainability, opened with a figure she said tends to surprise people: construction and the built environment account for close to 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions. Eissa told delegates that targets and measurement tools for cutting embodied carbon largely already exist – what is genuinely in short supply is the institutional capability to use them consistently, at scale, as standard practice. She set out FIDIC's own Carbon Management Framework and its newer Carbon Management Guide, which builds carbon budgets directly into FIDIC contracts as a mandatory procurement evaluation criterion.
Nicolas Miravals, CEO of ORIS, addressed how much of the capability gap is really a data-access problem rather than a skills or process one, drawing on a pilot project with the African Development Bank that delivered significant carbon reductions. Akanksha Rajpurohit of Intercontinental Consultants and Technocrats in India spoke to how a large multidisciplinary firm builds carbon management capability consistently across very different regulatory environments. Joost Merema of PRO6 managers, who also chairs FIDIC’s Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council, addressed whether carbon management survives better sitting with a dedicated sustainability specialist or with the project manager, and raised a less obvious connection between building diverse, inclusive teams and building genuine cross-disciplinary carbon capability.
FIDIC Integrity Forum 2026 – From Principles to Practice: Building Integrity into Infrastructure
A late addition to the Tuesday programme, this session broke from the traditional panel format in favour of an interactive discussion building on the Integrity Forum held at GIC 2025. Organised by FIDIC’s Integrity Management Committee, the session explored how leadership, organisational culture, transparency and effective integrity management can translate commitments into everyday business and project practice, addressing integrity challenges faced by organisations and individuals across the infrastructure lifecycle.
The session was moderated jointly by Ahmed Stifi, chair of FIDIC’s Integrity Management Committee and managing director of Acumen Consulting, Dr Rodrigo Juarez, the committee's vice chair, and Hamish Goldie-Scot of the CoST Infrastructure Transparency Initiative, who encouraged delegates to exchange experiences, challenge assumptions and identify practical actions to strengthen integrity and trust across the global infrastructure industry.
Taken together, the five sessions reinforced a thread that has run through much of GIC26 – that the industry’s ambitions – on technology, nature, transport safety, carbon and integrity alike – increasingly outpace the institutional capability, contractual clarity and consistent practice needed to deliver on them, and that closing that gap, not setting the ambition itself, is now the harder and more urgent task.
