Recent articles in the engineering media point to the unique resources and responsibilities that engineering can bring to planning and building our infrastructure in a time of climate change.
Building for Climate Change
David Fork and Ross Koningstein, two Google engineers writing in the IEEE Spectrum claim that engineers can disrupt Climate Change and decarbonization, carbon capture, and solar-radiation management will provide work for decades to come.
Our opening battles in the war on climate change need engineers to work on the many existing technologies that can massively scale up. As already illustrated with wind, solar, and batteries, such scale-ups often bring dramatic drops in costs. Other industrial sectors require technological revolutions to reduce emissions. If you experiment with your own mix of climate-mitigation techniques using the En-ROADS interactive climate tool, you’ll see how many options you have to max out to change our current trajectory and achieve 350 ppm CO2 levels and a global temperature rise of no more than 1.5 °C.1
The authors have compiled a set of engineering calculations that are important for engineering our response to climate change.
Table of Engineering Considerations
Engineers Canada asks why is climate change important for engineers? Climate change is a significant and lasting change in weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It includes changes to temperature, precipitation and other climate parameters and changes in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes and flash storms. In northern Canada climate effects on permafrost, ice-cover and snow loads are already apparent.
Much of Canada’s infrastructure has been in place for many years with designs based on existing climate patterns. With the effects of a changing climate, these designs need to be revisited to improve safety and protection for Canadians. Engineers, under their professional code of ethics, need to be involved in addressing the impacts of changing climate on infrastructure design and operations because it affects public safety and public interest.2
Engineers are held to a higher standard of reasonable care than the average layperson. By virtue of the professional’s training and experience, they are expected to apply a high level of expertise to issues that affect their professional practice.
Professionals are expected to be aware of the limitations of their professional scope and access other qualified professionals to augment those areas where they may not be fully qualified to express professional judgment. Through extensive media coverage, the average layperson is cognizant of the climate change issue and its potential for disruptive and serious impacts. Similarly, the average engineer must also be sensitive to the potential for changing climate conditions and appropriately apply these sensitivities to their professional practice. Given the level of public awareness of the climate change issue, a professional cannot make the argument that they were unaware that climate change could potentially affect their professional work. 3
Darrel Danyluk is a past president of Engineers Canada and of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta. He is also a previous chair of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations Committee on Engineering and the Environment. David Lapp is a member of the WFEO Committee on Engineering and the Environment. They ask what are the key priorities for climate action within engineering? Some priorities for engineering should be:
Education of existing practitioners, students and educators;
Updating of existing codes, standards and guidelines or the creation of new ones where there are gaps;
Better evidence of costs and benefits of adaptation and building climate resilience, particularly for civil infrastructure and buildings; and
Developing multi-stakeholder concurrence on the need for adaptive and mitigative actions.
The main barrier is in implementation, which is often caused by a lack of financial commitment by decision-makers. Costs to mitigate and adapt to climate change are still uncertain and it’s difficult to obtain effective cost-shared agreements and division of responsibilities among stakeholders. In Canada, it’s sometimes difficult to coordinate and agree on actions between all three levels of government as there are jurisdictional and institutional limits to action. Some infrastructure owners aren’t prepared to invest in climate action measures, especially for designs that are outside of existing codes and standards that are becoming increasingly outdated as the climate changes. There’s also a reluctance to implement measures outside of existing guidelines and practices that often haven’t taken climate change into account.4
Calculating the material, workforce, and economic requirements to adapt and build resilience in our infrastructure is the traditional role of engineers. Now the costs and benefits of mitigative and adaptive measures need to be confirmed and included in building codes and construction practice.
References
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