EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: SDGs as our most strategic priority over the next ten years.: Rodrigo Fernandes

Metro Rail News Managing Editor Mr. Narendra Shah conducted a one-on-one interview during his visit to London for Bentley System's Year in Infrastructure Conference and Going Digital Awards 2022 with Rodrigo Fernandes. During the interaction, Mr. Fernandes talked about Sustainable Development goals and recognised infrastructure.

- Mr. Narendra Shah

Rodrigo Fernandes is Director, ES(D)GEmpowering Sustainable Development Goals at at Bentley Systems from August 2021. He is also working as an Environmental Engineering Industry Expert from October 2020 to till now. He completed his Ph. D in Environmental Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico from 2012-2018, and after that, he got a certificate in Sustainable Business Strategy from Harvard Business School Online. After his Education, he worked as a Scientific Researcher, Project Manager, and Environmental Engineer and joined Bentley Systems as a Senior Consultant in November 2017.

Here are the excerpts from the interview

How can the construction sector recognised infrastructure?

Ans: In the construction sector, we consider two main topics that work with each other but need different approaches. One is the carbonising construction. That's one of the big issues, and the other one is climate adaptation and resilience. We consider both points to be adopted in parallel or together, but from a carbonisation point of view, we need to start addressing the problem of what can be called low-hanging fruits of quick wings. Bentley, as a company and many of the technologies we have around, work on efficiency, circularity, and reducing water and material usage by designs. Considering machine learning, Al, cloud technologies, and everything else put on digital infrastructure, digital twins, we can immediately reduce carbon footprint in a powerful way, which is an important approach that we consider.