Energy, Environment and Sustainability Group
The programme will comprise a three-stage learning programme, providing new understanding of the engineering challenges and solutions in a future world that will have changed in ways that we can only partly forecast or control. We will be seeking to lay out valuable and useful information, understanding, and tools to help engineers deliver a sustainable future for the benefit of society at large.
The programme will be led by EESG, but will involve all the diverse Industry Divisions and Cross- Sectoral Groups within IMechE, so that the outcomes will enable mechanical engineers in all sectors. The programme will also integrate the expertise of non-engineers who are our professional counterparts in the three “pillars of sustainability”, the Environment, Society and the Economy, that is we will invite professional ecologists, professional social scientists, and professional economists to add their input, and to ensure that the learning we deliver is consistent with all three pillars, as well as being good engineering.
We are able to put on this programme thanks to funding from the Technical Strategy Board of the IMechE, under a new funding mechanism that was proposed, by EESG, a couple of years ago.
Stage 1 of the programme will be an “Expert Meeting”. During the first half of 2014 we will hold a brainstorming workshop. We will invite key people working in “engineering for sustainability”, plus representatives of all the 18 Divisions and Groups at IMechE, plus professional ecologists, social scientists, and economists. This workshop will put together all the experience and expertise of these diverse minds to identify the questions that we need to answer to develop a sustainable future, which either have not been asked before or to which we currently have no answers. They may include “what changes can we foresee, how will future change differ from past changes, are we going in the right direction, where do we want to be?” and then the engineering consequences of each. These will be highly focused questions whose answers will add new and valuable to understanding and tools for the benefit of mechanical engineers and society at large.
A previous Expert Meeting hosted by EESG led to the publication by IMechE of “the Carbon Challenge” and the first comparative CO2 emissions data between road, rail, air and water transport. We hope this exercise will yield similarly valuable outcomes.
Stage 2 will comprise a small number of research projects, to find answers to the key questions identified in the Expert Meeting, assuming that we secure the required quality of research proposals (which we won’t know until the event!). We do expect a large number of high quality research proposals, and that the collective experts will prioritise those should can be implemented first. We will also seek match funding and sponsorship to increase the number of research projects we can fund. The more we can fund, the more we will be able to enable engineering for a sustainable future. Each research project will be commissioned from the most appropriate source, whether or not they are IMechE members of participants in the Expert Meeting. Each will produce a report which will be published by IMechE
Stage 3 will comprise the dissemination of the research findings. This could include a seminar, a report, online resources or other media as appropriate to the most effective dissemination. It will depend on the nature of the outputs from the Expert Meeting, and on the nature of the research reports. This dissemination will be planned in more detail during stages 1 & 2, and is likely to take place in late 2014 or in 2015.
This marks a major step forward for the work of IMechE members on “engineering for sustainability”.