Embedding sustainability in civil and environmental engineering courses

Abstract

To sustain human civilization into the foreseeable future, the education of the engineering leaders of tomorrow needs to include sustainability so that the full consequences of engineering decisions and actions are considered. Sustainability is a dynamic characteristic of a system that must be assessed and managed over time. All resources available to development must be considered when engineering of systems is being undertaken. In this paper, a new approach to assessing to what degree sustainability principles have been embedded into engineering degree programs is introduced and applied to the Civil and Environmental Engineering degree program at the University of Adelaide. The results obtained indicate that there is a high degree of embedment of sustainability principles in the degree program. From first year, the lecture material on problem solving, sustainability and mind mapping leads the students through open ended problems that many engineering problems fall within. Through subsequent years, the social, economic, environmental and infrastructure aspects of sustainability are addressed in greater detail. At level four, groups of students choose to research aspects of sustainability in their major research projects. Many graduates of this program have made sustainability in their respective organisations a main theme of any work they perform.