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Sustainability by definition is the method of using a resource in a way that the resource is notdepleted
or permanently damaged. (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). Traditionally theconcept of
sustainability has been applied to relating biological systems (the Earth) and humansystems
(society).Sustainable Development as defined by the ASCE in 1996: “Sustainable Development is
thechallenge of meeting human needs for natural resources, industrial products, energy,
food,transportation, shelter, and effective waste management while conserving and
protectingenvironmental quality and the natural resource base essential for future
development.”(ASCECode of Ethics, 1996)What is sustainability in construction and civil engineering?
Sustainability is defined the desire to perform activities without any depletion of resources orbringing
any harmful effect on the environment.Practicing sustainable construction methodswill help avoiding
harmful effects from construction activities.Construction involves activities like use of building materials
from various sources, use ofmachineries, demolition of existing structures, use of green fields, cutting
down of tress etc.which can impact environment in one or more ways. Civil engineering field being the
major partof the economy, it is very essential that sustainable construction practice dominate the
pastfollowed conventional construction practice and methods.Need for Sustainable
ConstructionConstruction has a direct impact on the environment due to following
reasons:1.Generation of waste materials2.Emissions from vehicles, machineries3.Noise pollution due to
use of heavy vehicles and construction machineries.4.Releases of wastes and pollutants into water,
ground and atmosphere.Sustainability assessment of construction projects is essential to the fact that it
does not createany harmful effects on the living ecosystem while optimizing the cost of construction.
This is toensure the availability of resources for the future generations.

How to Ensure Sustainable Construction?In order to support sustainability in the field of construction,
the building and the builtenvironment have to satisfy some of the important criteria. This will
include:1.Biodiversity Enhancement2.Support to the Community3.Effective Use of Resources4.Pollution
Reduction5.Creating Healthy Environment6.Process Management1. Biodiversity
Enhancement•Sustainable Construction must stop threatening use of environment or species
whereverpossible so that the natural habitat is not affected.2. Support to the Community•Support and
help should reach to the real need, aspirations and real requirements. Alsoinvolve the needed in the key
decisions.3. Effective use of resources•Overconsumption of inappropriate amount of resources like land,
money, use ordisposal, construction must be stopped. Wastage of resources, materials, water,
poordesign is not recommended. The buildings constructed have to be affordable andmanageable.

Abstract

Drawing on 12 years of experience in leading engineering programmes for sustainability in a UK

University, the authors take a wide view of the broad range of skills young civil engineers need to deliver

the projects they are involved in more effectively. These include dealing with complexity, uncertainty,

environmental limits, change, people, trade-offs, other disciplines and whole life costs. In short the

paper asks what education do the next generation of civil engineers need to act sustainability in what

Schon (1987) memorably called “the swamp” of professional practice? The paper examines the

fundamental principles all engineers should be guided by, the optimum points to discuss such issues in

the engineers educational formation, how sustainability in the curricula can be linked to civil

engineering practice and specific examples of teaching strategies and pedagogies that the authors have

found to be effective. A brief review of UK and international best practice in demonstrating the
progress that has already been made towards these goals is also presented.

Keywords: Education & training , Sustainability , Social Impact, Environment

Introduction

Teaching sustainability to civil engineering undergraduate and postgraduate students raises some

interesting reactions, with often heard comments such as those below:

“ I’ve just finished the final year elective in Sustainability and I’m disappointed they didn’t tell me how to

build a sustainable bridge”.

“ Oh we didn’t have specialist electives in our University but I suppose we found that sustainability
issues

were dealt with at every turn in every subject, as it affects everything we do, and can’t be separated out

like that”.

“Well I’m on a postgraduate course and we took a different route putting everything in a systems

context allowing us particularly to deal with the non-technical challenges, including the impact of our

engineering on people”
“ I’ve been listening to you three talk and I don’t see the point of sustainability, it’s woolly and vague
and

I don’t like being told there is no right answer, but I’m quite happy to do my bit to save the
environment”

Conversations like this are revealing as they highlight both students expectations and frustrations with

what is now an essential part of civil engineering degree programmes, required by the Joint Board of

Moderators (JBM) (see below). Let’s deconstruct the sentiments expressed above. The first student has

the notion that sustainability is something that can be taught like other Newtonian – mechanical

subjects, reflecting their own reductionist training and an expectation of something equivalent to a

Code of Practice or design checklist. This individual would expect that if these were followed carefully

they should automatically result in a sustainable bridge. This very largely misses a key point, which is

that sustainable solutions arise out of a better understanding of the context in which the engineering is

being delivered, and therefore decisions, designs and delivery systems will be different in every

circumstance. Sustainable thinking can’t just be reduced to a set of design rules. A key issue for a “bolt
on” course for sustainability is not to teach better solutions but to encourage students to ask better

questions of the work in which they are involved, and to recognise that sustainability deals with

complex, messy problems which have a value-laden perspective for which there may be no appropriate

simple, technical fix. This is a challenging concept creating uncomfortable feelings in some students and

academic staff alike.

The second student seems to have had a better experience, as at their University sustainability

education has not been treated as an apparent optional extra, therefore avoiding sending the subliminal

message that it is something we can choose to specialise in if we wish, but also ignore quite safely if it is

an area we are not naturally drawn to. Instead sustainability is introduced and embedded throughout

his course, from Day 1, and discussed in everything from material selection to the life cycle impacts of

deep foundations. Whilst this encourages sustainability considerations to become second nature, the

emphasis most often lies on environmental sustainability (also reflecting how these issues are often

interpreted in industry). Concern for reducing carbon footprints, using less materials, controlling waste
etc are all very valid and worthwhile issues to address, but engineering decision-making in reality is

more complex when people and the delivery of infrastructure services that are wanted (or not) comes

into play. This approach reflects a weakness in the whole sustainability debate which is not to address

adequately the human or social dimension in what in reality is a messy socio-economic-technical

system.

It is the postgraduate student who seems to have experienced the need to push traditional discipline

constrained boundaries: to see engineering activity and the delivery of infrastructure services as a series

of interrelated systems, with a rational functional-technical system sitting alongside a relational system

which includes organisational structures and social interactions. Given that engineering education MUST

teach the basic physical principles properly, and no-one is arguing that these should be supplanted or

replaced, then it is at postgraduate Masters level where these fundamental skills might be added to and

supplemented, with many of the issues around sustainability being possible to explore effectively in
depth. It is engineering graduates and young professional engineers who already have some experience

of operating in engineering practice, who can have the freedom to fully engage with difficult problems

for which there is simply insufficient time and curriculum space in undergraduate programmes.

And finally we come to the sceptic. These are found at all levels in the profession. Such extreme

antagonists to ideas of sustainability are described in McDonough and Braungart’s new book “The

Upcycle” (2013) as follows: “They test us and everyone else. They are wonderful; they are honest. And

once they are personally convinced and get on board, they are very powerful advocates for a

sustainable world.”

In some ways this scepticism goes to a fear that the traditional role of the engineer is being threatened.

No longer can engineers sit above or outside society as technical advocates who ”know best” and

impose solutions on the rest of the world through a design and defend attitude, but need to take a

much more subtle approach of being what has been called honest brokers ( Azapagic et al, 2004). To act

in this way requires judging each of several alternative solutions on merit and avoiding pre-determined
solutions, simply because they have worked (elsewhere?), sometime in the past (often when the world

was operating under a very different set of constraints). In the modern world it is often not the most

technically optimum and sophisticated solution that gains the most traction, but perhaps the next best

scheme which is acceptable to the widest range of stakeholders and satisfies a wider range of multiple

objectives/constraints. Witness the on-going debates around HS2. Learning this is uncomfortable, and

may rather glibly be akin to convincing a highway engineer that the best solution to congestion and lack

of network capacity may be NOT to build a new road.

These reflections frame the challenges faced by educationalists: a need to address messy problems

through a lens of complexity and systems thinking, to recognise the social and non-technical aspects and

consequences of an engineer’s work, together with the need to give young engineers the confidence to

change and challenge orthodox design solutions conceived in previous times when constraints such as

climate change and growing resource scarcity were not limiting factors.
How these can be addressed and delivered in civil engineering programmes is the subject of the rest of

this paper.

life cost accounting; backcasting and scenario planning; multi-criteria decision making and system

dynamics.

One of the difficulties with many sustainability discussions however, is how to apply widely accepted

principles in day to day practice. In other words how can the new engineering professionals

operationalise what they have learnt from an academic environment. To address this directly Ainger and

Fenner (2014) have proposed a hierarchy of sustainability principles that can be applied effectively at

every stage of the project lifecycle. Engineers understand the concept of physical principles, such as

conservation of mass, or Newton’s laws of motion. They provide the basic ideas, rules or concepts that

need to be kept in mind when solving an engineering problem. Designers also use principles such as

“keep it simple, stupid” and “keep the target audience in mind” to guide their thinking. Principles play a

key role in setting the context for the choices that have to be made and can be used to guide sustainable
decision making at all stages of infrastructure delivery. These sustainability principles are grouped as

follows.

First there are 4 absolute principles which are incontrovertible consequences of natural science laws

and basic humanity. They should sit alongside the familiar concepts of physical principles when solving

an engineering problem. These absolute principles are at the heart of driving sustainability and

represent the constraints within which civil engineering activity must be delivered.

The first two of these principles are defined by the boundaries circumscribed by Raworth (2012) in

Figure 1. They refer to A1: Work within environmental limits imposed by the 9 planetary boundaries

which must be preserved to maintain the essential natural support systems of the planet.

Simultaneously A2: Develop minimum socio-economic standards for humanity by helping to provide the

social foundation for development in terms of provision of minimum quantities of food, water and

energy as well as the right to education, gender and social equality and employment.

The third principle: A3: Consider intergenerational equity simply requires that decisions and actions
taken now don’t close off options or choices for future generations to live sustainably. It asks civil

engineers to take an anticipatory view of the kind of future they wish to create in ways that

infrastructure can add benefit, and avoid damage into the future. While the engineered services that

society enjoys have often provided buffers against environmental extremes (drought, flood, food

security, disease transmission), they sometimes have done so at the cost of a lock-in to expensive

technical solutions that do not respond well and cannot be adapted quickly, to the changing and

uncertain circumstances which will be faced in this century. Bequeathing assets that lack the necessary

resilience to respond to a range of plausible future scenarios is one way in which engineers have already

constrained those who come after them.

The final absolute principle is A4: Conceive solutions as part of a wider complex system. In most civil

engineering projects there are links between the technical aspects of transportation, building or water

systems and social systems, based on the users of the infrastructure, as manifested in urbanisation,

communication and public health, and also the environmental attributes of their natural and urban
surroundings. These are intricately linked. There are flows of materials, wealth, energy, labour, waste

and information between these systems. Better understanding of these inter-dependancies should

reduce the unexpected consequences arising from narrow decisions taken in one infrastructure sector

having adverse affects other sectors. As Paul Brown (2008), Executive Vice President of CDM (USA) has

observed: “to achieve sustainable urban development we need to do more than improve the efficiency
of

each of the component parts of our infrastructure – we need to do so at the level of the whole urban

system”.

These absolute principles translate into a more workable set of operational principles which can help

engineers set objectives and guide actions in day-to-day practice. They help establish a distinct way of

doing things, partly by recognising issues that traditionally may not have been within the engineer’s
remit.

They are the processes that need to be embraced at each stage of a project and include the following:

 Set targets and measure against environmental limits

 Set targets and measure for socio-economic goals

 Respect people and human rights

 Plan for the long term

 Consider all life cycle stages

 Open up the problem space (beyond sectoral and discipline boundaries)

 Deal with uncertainty

 Consider integrated need ( encouraging multi functionality of assets)

 Integrate working roles and disciplines

Crucially it is as individuals, acting alone or collectively, that decisions are made that can influence a

project outcome to be more sustainable. These represent the often overlooked value base for

sustainability, reflecting both an individual’s professional and personal ethos. Engineering students
should be educated to ask a fundamental question of themselves at every stage of their careers: “Am I

acting sustainably?”. This requires embracing two final individual principles: Learn new skills and

challenge orthodoxy and encourage change.

When and where is sustainability important?

The previous section gives rise to the question of at what point should these ideas be introduced, both

in terms of HE programmes and in stages of project delivery. All students graduating from civil

engineering degree programmes need to have an awareness of sustainable development issues, and be

able to calculate, for example, the capital and operational carbon embodied in civil engineering projects,

understand the ethical choices which have to be made and recognise the environmental and social

impacts engineering projects can have. However it is at the level of postgraduate professional practice

Masters programmes where there is most freedom to move beyond both curriculum constraints and the

traditional emphasis on reductionist thinking which characterises many first degree programmes

designed to convey basic engineering science and general principles. It is at the postgraduate level that
the application of these principles can be more freely explored against the constraints and complexities

represented by the wider issues relating to sustainability.

Fisk and Ahearn (2006) have pointed out that Masters education provides two clear advantages.

Students bring with them a maturity and realism of outlook based on their own experiences of working

within engineering organisations. They are also likely to take up positions of significant responsibility

when completing such courses and be employed as leaders of engineering projects or recruited

specifically to change management procedures towards more sustainable approaches. Fisk and Ahearn

go on to suggest that such students “are able to challenge assumptions in the classroom rather than

discover a disjunction with reality only when they try to apply acquired knowledge in the field”.

Despite this apparent desire to see specialisation for some in sustainability thinking and skills, there are

opportunities at every stage of project delivery for every well informed and sustainability educated

engineer to make a difference. For example at the outset when determining the over-riding business

strategy of a project, business models can be chosen which sells the “service” rather than the “product”
thus aligning commercial success with sustainability gains. Similarly an adaptive climate change strategy

can be adopted with forms of contract and performance measurements aligned to these clear objectives

and targets. At the project scoping stage these objectives can be translated into project performance

specifications and wider project consequences can be considered across users/customers, local

communities and supply chains. Stakeholders should be engaged throughout the project delivery

process, including working with regulators to open up the space for innovation. Procurement policy can

help provide extra socio-economic benefits of training, jobs and income, and wealth creation to the

locality, region or country.

For some the outline design stage may be the first opportunity to influence a project, often by widening

the range of options considered to provide real sustainable alternatives which are judged against

carefully chosen sustainability criteria and indicators. A danger when arriving at the detailed design

stage is that many possible sustainable options have been closed off by earlier decisions, but design-life
and re-use options can be explored as well as the benefits of off-site manufacture, and combining the

functions of components for resource and energy efficiency, and specifying materials with low

embodied carbon and where possible derived from renewable sources. Construction practices can be

carefully modified to reduce on-site energy use and waste and to incorporate social/community

relations in standard risk management procedures. During operation sustainability performance can be

continually monitored, and preventive maintenance carried out to maximise efficiency improvements.

Finally, at the end of life the residual material can be dealt with in the following order of preference:

directly re-use; dismantle, reclaim and reuse; demolish, reclaim and recycle; demolish and dispose.

These are just some practical everyday steps the individual who is committed to engineering

sustainability can achieve. This may be more likely if their education and training has emphasised the

techniques and opportunities which can be adopted, in a positive manner rather than a more negative

approach which can sometimes portray the growing problems we face as insurmountable. As Mulder et

al observe (2013) motivating students beyond the fear of global catastrophe is a warning for educators
to learn and connecting academic discourse with real life problems can aid that process.

How can sustainability be conveyed (in an educational setting)?

The final parts of this paper will reflect on ways which can stimulate students on civil engineering

programmes to be encouraged to approach the design, construction and operational aspects of the

work they will subsequently be involved from both an innovative and change perspective. To do this civil

engineering education needs not just to provide the factual basis for evaluating engineering

consequences but to develop specific skills, as shown in Table 1.

Skill How developed

Dealing with complexity through adopting a systems approach.

Dealing with uncertainty when decision making in the absence of complete information or evidence.

Dealing with change by challenging orthodoxy and envisioning the future.

Dealing with other disciplines through building multi-disciplinary teams.

Dealing with environmental limits through resource efficiency, pollution control and maintaining
ecosystem services.
Dealing with people through consultation processes and negotiation to meet society’s and individual’s
needs.

Dealing with whole life costs by considering project externalities and life cycle management.

Dealing with trade-offs by avoiding optimisation around a single variable to create solutions acceptable
for all.

Table 1: skills required for engineering sustainability

These skills are not generally appreciated through standard lectures but through a range of

complimentary learning activities, such as (but not limited to) the ones described by Cruickshank and

Fenner (2012) and summarised below:

Role Plays

An important aspect to understanding the broader context in which civil engineering solutions must be

delivered is to create an emotional attachment to the outcome of the decision. Experiencing something

of the (perhaps irrational ) passion displayed when decision stakes are high over an issue relating to a

large infrastructure project, for example, can enable students to have more empathy towards
stakeholders. Dieleman and Huisingh (2006) argue that using role play based around cases of specific

development projects can provide the circumstances to understand the behaviour of people within

these contexts and to understand the linkages between certain problems, the behaviour and

technologies within these contexts and the problems that result. Most importantly it can encourage

contextual thinking and explore issues such as trade-offs, uncertainty, dealing with people and change.

An example of such a role play is Puerto Mauricio (van der Wansem et al, 2003) based on a fictional

coastal town in which a large and culturally significant parcel of land is about to be sold. Students take

on the roles of a variety of stakeholders and try to reach agreement on the development plans for the

area. Role plays can also simulate the nature of how decisions are reached over large infrastructure

projects through mimicking formal adversarial public enquiries or by consensus building negotiation.

Case Study Field Work

These are useful for creating a group dynamic in which task sharing is important. They can be used to
explore at first hand real dilemmas surrounding existing or planned civil engineering projects. Dieleman

and Huisingh (2006) argue that “case studies … provide the context to understand the particular

behaviour of people within these contexts and to understand (comprehend) the linkages

between certain problems, the behaviour and technologies within these contexts and the problems that

result. It leads to contextual thinking’ and provides solutions that are context specific”.

Transport schemes make good case studies, where students can be asked ostensibly to find solutions to

the alignment of a new road past a sensitive site such as Stonehenge, but the reality is to expose them
to

how the complexity of constraints have led in practice to the inability to implement a solution to date,

leaving the problem indefinitely unresolved. Such schemes are good examples of messy problem in
which

solutions must embrace non-technical as well as engineering features. Visits to sites where specific

technologies or initiatives have been installed and deployed such as wind farms or solar arrays,

sustainable housing developments and urban landscaping can also stimulate discussion around whether

such approaches can be scaled up and scaled out. Such activity can show how sustainability principles
can
be incorporated at a level of operational detail.

Simulation games

Dieleman and Huisingh (2006) discuss the use of games and simulation models to convey key concepts

of sustainable development in relation to Kolb’s theory of experiential learning (1984). They argue that

using simulation tools, students are able to influence the system, but usually are not able to steer the

system in exactly the direction they would like. This means they must try to understand how the system

functions and to find ways to make the necessary changes. These kind of system simulations can help

the user to understand the functioning of leverage points. These are crucial in the system because by

working at these points the entire system can be changed more effectively and efficiently. The use of

such models also clearly integrates the important time dimension into the analysis, crucial for an

understanding of sustainable development, but often overlooked in teaching strategies. An example of

how such simulations can be used to explore the inter-dependancies of coupled resource systems is
provided by Bajzelj et al (2014).

Many games exist and some can be used to introduce key concepts such as framing the problem,

working within resource limits, or seeing issues from different viewpoints. Readers are referred to the

System Thinking Playbook by Sweeney and Meadows (2010) for a comprehensive set of examples. A

recently developed board game, Gasuco, developed in Sweden, is designed to stimulate discussion of

sustainability topics between groups of 4 students and can be used to introduce topics such as the

impacts of climate change, resource depletion or biodiversity loss (Dahlin et al, 2013). This is another

example of where students are actively engaged in thinking about the issues, rather than passively

absorbing information from more conventional teaching styles.

More extended games that may take a larger part of a day to complete are often built on system

dynamics simulations using computer models. Here scenarios are set with the players required to make

choices to satisfy an end objective, but their decisions are made with incomplete information on the

system response, which is tracked out of view of the players in the background by the computer
simulation. The aim is to reach a sustainable solution over a sequence of several rounds. Such a game is

Fishbanks (Meadows, 2004) in which fleets of boats of different sizes and owned by a range of operators

from families to multi-national corporations seek to optimise their fishing catches and profit whilst

staying in business. The diminishing fish stocks are recorded by the computer but not revealed to the

participants until the end, providing a good illustration of the tragedy of the commons and offering a

rich opportunity to de-brief on many of the sustainability themes discussed earlier.

A modified version of Building Futures, originally developed by RIBA/CABE (2008) as a tool to help

communities to think about the future of their neighbourhood, can be used to explore trade-offs in
urban

planning where various options have designated “points” associated with them and participants must

allocate a “spend” of these points against a planning timeline while also meeting some overarching

objectives. Analysis of this game allows students to reflect on the need to balance early wins with long-

term plans and to address the diverse needs and desires of different members of the community. The
aim
is to encourage students to look for non-technical as well as the more traditional engineering solutions.

Change challenges

These can be undertaken individually by students who identify an issue which affects them, often at a

personal level. They undertake to make a positive change over a period of weeks, keeping a log of their

progress along the way. The scale and impact of the challenge is of less significance than the experience

of undertaking the change and feeling the emotional aspects of the success and frustration

encountered. This activity enhances students’ ability to appreciate ways in which to instigate a change

and make it successful and this can be demonstrated through a follow-on assignment to produce a

strategy for change in an organisation or company.

Multi-criteria decision making

A simple exercise can be constructed around using the Analytical Hierarchy Procedure (for example) in

which the object is to choose a sustainable retrofit option to reduce the carbon footprint in a UK

domestic building. Criteria to be considered are cost, reduction on greenhouse gas emissions and ease
of installation and maintenance. Four alternatives can be evaluated: sealing the building envelope, on-

site energy generation, installation of energy efficient appliances and home monitoring with smart

performance meters. Students are encouraged to make their own informed judgement to determine the

relative pair-wise comparison of criteria with a brief discussion on the rationale used. A single preferred

alternative is identified, and the exercise repeated to understand how sensitive the outcome is to the

choice of weightings. Such exercises can be extended to more technically based topics such as the

process selection for a wastewater treatment plant.

Consultancy projects

Teams of students can provide a consultancy service for a real external engineering client advising on

some sustainability aspects of their operation. The terms of reference for the work should be negotiated

and agreed at the outset and might vary considerably but must address a problem facing the

organisation from a sustainability perspective and can provide opportunities for local companies to
harness the technical skills and innovative ideas of students. Such exercises root the range of possible

solutions within real world practicalities and participants often need to develop the honest broker skills

referred to earlier in evaluating a series of possible alternative solutions.

Some observations on best practice and progress made

There are many challenges in introducing sustainability concepts to civil engineering students. Some of

the obstacles include limited frames of reference by curriculum designers, misunderstanding of

sustainable development boundaries, and a low priority given to the breadth of sustainability issues in

relation to narrow subject specialisation favoured by some academics, driven by a commitment to a

research agenda. Time constraints on undergraduates driven by heavy workloads and stringent

assessment systems can restrict the discussion of sustainability topics. The process of developing

appropriate pedagogies for engineering sustainability education is not straightforward. An approach

developed in a number of Universities, including TU Delft in the Netherlands (Peet D. and Muldur K.F. ,

2002) , is to identify champions for sustainability who work with academic colleagues in exploring ways
in which sustainability concepts can be interwoven with their own teaching of more traditional civil

engineering subjects.

Specific undergraduate programmes exist, for example in Civil Engineering with Sustainability at Brunel

University (http://www.brunel.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/civil-engineering-with-sustainability-beng).

Sinnot and Thompson (2012) describe a new degree in Sustainable Civil Engineering in Ireland which

makes clear linkages between topics such as design and sustainability, ethics and sustainability by the

inclusion of practical examples, problem solving and encouraging decision making. This course also

introduces modules in Clean Energy Technologies, Sustainable Energy, Construction Technology

Systems, Innovative Technology, and Building Energy Performance.

Glendinning et al (2013) describe changes to the content of the Civil Engineering degrees at Newcastle

University which are designed to engage “students with the global challenge of engineering a

sustainable future for the planet, placing Civil Engineering at the heart of delivering infrastructure and

living environments that are sustainable in the 21st century and beyond’. Fenner et al (2005) have
described how sustainable development has been embedded in the Engineering Department at

Cambridge University reflecting on the actual process of initiating change in an academic institution and

where the education balance should lie: between providing access to technological knowledge which

can be applied to designing hard solutions, and training engineers to rethink their fundamental

approach towards a broader, multiple perspective approach in which problem formulation and context

setting play a vital role in reaching consensual solutions with a disparate range of stakeholders.

A wider (non-institutional) view of embedding sustainability into undergraduate civil engineering

courses is provided by Oliver Broadbent (2012) who identifies three challenges that engineers must

overcome in the field of sustainable design: coping with complexity; values-based decision making, and

interdisciplinary working. He also establishes a further key principle by recognising that “sustainability is

mindset, not a subject” and that an important element in this kind of education is to take the learners

outside their comfort zone. In a related vein Al-Rahaway (2013) sees the missing link in engineering
education for sustainable development to be the ethical and moral values of ‘managers’ and urges

universities to proactively and aggressively ‘infuse’ ethical and moral teachings and values into their

respective curricula.

At postgraduate level UK Masters programmes at Cambridge University, Imperial College, Surrey

University, Strathclyde University and Heriot Watt University have established taught courses exploring

the relationship between engineering and sustainable development. There are several other

programmes at other UK Universities which focus on specific issues such as sustainable energy, climate

change, urban planning etc.

In the USA Augsburger (2009) identifies 20 American Universities incorporating sustainability into civil

engineering programmes based on the “Benchmarking Sustainable Engineering Education: Final Report”

(Allen D. et al (2009)) and introduces a metric for assessing the sustainability content in each

programme. Bielfeldt (2013) at the University of Colorado reports on the experiences of using different

teaching methods to educate engineering students about sustainability, including case studies, software
tools, project based-learning (PBL) and project based service learning (PBSL) and assesses whether the

methods achieved the targeted learning outcomes. She notes that reflective essays with appropriate

prompts can encourage students to consider the value that they place on sustainability both

personally and professionally, but observes engineering students are often uncomfortable

engaging in these open-ended explorations of their values, feelings, and emotions.

In a study of what engineering students learn on sustainability courses, Segalas et al (2010) found that

“most students after taking a course on SD focus on the technological aspects of sustainability,

regarding technology as offering solutions to environmental problems”. They concluded that there was

much less emphasis on the social/institutional aspects of sustainability. Cruickshank and Fenner (2012)

looked at 108 institutions in the UK and 31 in North America and were unable to find much evidence of

programmes that are actively designed to change the mindset of engineers, concluding that in many

cases engineering for sustainable development can be reduced to just the level of a smarter technical
fix. A recent paper by Cech (2014) reported a longitudinal survey of 326 engineering students at four US

Universities which showed that students’ experiences over the course of their undergraduate

programmes decreases their interest in the public welfare considerations of engineering work. Cech also

notes that even if programmes introduce social justice lectures directly into engineering classrooms, the

subtle messages students often receive about the relevance and value of these considerations mean

that they may be unlikely to develop critical awareness of public welfare issues.

A database of 275 global academic programmes in sustainability is provided by the e-Journal

Sustainability:Science, Practice & Policy (see

This covers a wide range of disciplines but it is revealing that only 5 relate specifically to engineering.

Academics concerned with the issues raised in this paper meet regularly through an International

Conference series in Engineering Education for Sustainable Development where best practice and novel

teaching methods are discussed and shared. Proceedings of the 6th Conference , EESD13 , can be found

at: http://www-eesd13.eng.cam.ac.uk/ ,however to date civil engineering is not strongly represented in

Conclusions

So how can the students we eavesdropped on at the beginning best be served? The answer, of course, is

that there is not a one size fits all educational approach which will suit all teachers and all students alike.

There are many pedagogies which have value and students have different learning styles - so a mix of

methods is required. To prescribe otherwise would fail the first test of sustainability thinking: that

solutions are context specific and dictated by their location and circumstances.

However, much can be learned by sharing best practice and critically reviewing what has worked and

what has not. It is fashionable to cite sustainability as a core pillar claimed to be addressed in many

degree programmes. As the typical student comments above reveal, approaches can be mixed and

varied. Perhaps the best we can provide as educators is to give the civil engineers of the future the

confidence to ask better, smarter questions and to challenge at every stage why they are proceeding in

a certain manner. It is as simple as that. As one mature postgraduate student, a former Highway
Engineer, remarked when reflecting on the value of embracing sustainable development ideas in

engineering practice, she noted it had “provided the full 64 colour set of crayons rather than the eight

shades of grey pencil” with which she had been working for most of her professional life.