FIDIC Carbon Management Framework in Practice: What an AfDB Kenya Road Pilot Revealed

On a 72 km road upgrade in Kenya, the African Development Bank and the Kenya National Highways Authority tested the FIDIC Carbon Management Framework (CMF) for the first time in East Africa. ORIS ran the carbon and cost assessment. The pilot took six weeks.

Most teams have read the FIDIC guidance. Few have seen it applied to a real design, with real quantities and a real budget. That is where the questions start: where do we begin, what level are we at, and what do we write into the tender?

The pilot answered with numbers. One structural layer, the 400 mm cement-stabilised subgrade, drove about 72% of the project's 87,000 tCO2e baseline. Switching to blended binders and warm-mix asphalt cut carbon by 53% and pavement cost by 11.7%. The best combination of options reached a 68% carbon reduction at lower cost. It also showed where the framework still has room to grow: procurement. Carbon targets were not yet part of the tender documents.

Hear it from the people who ran it: FIDIC and Ramboll on where the CMF is going, AfDB on why it backed the pilot, and ORIS on what the model showed.

What You'll Learn

• How the CMF maturity assessment works on a real road project, and what Level 2 looks like in practice
• Where the carbon sat in a typical road design, and why one subgrade layer mattered more than everything else combined
• How low-carbon binders and warm-mix asphalt reduced both carbon and cost
• Why procurement integration is the weakest CMF component, and what a development bank can do about it
• What to prepare in your own project data to run a CMF baseline

Who Should Attend

• Sustainability Directors, Carbon Managers and Net Zero Leads at engineering consultancies and contractors
• Principal Engineers, Lead Engineers and Highway or Pavement Engineers
• Heads of Infrastructure Business Units and Technical Directors
• Directors of Highways and Programme Directors at road authorities and agencies
• Infrastructure lending, climate and safeguards specialists at development banks
• Bid and tender leads who see carbon requirements arriving in their next procurement

Session Format

• 10 min: FIDIC's carbon guidance, the CMF and CEM
• 10 min: AfDB on adopting the CMF in the SRMPA programme
• 15 min: ORIS on the project and decarbonisation results
• 20 min: moderated discussion and audience Q&A
• 5 min: what comes next, and how to run a baseline on your project