Welcome to this special issue of Civil Engineering, which is devoted to the practice of sustainable development. We have put together papers from some of the leading practitioners involved in the implementation of the sustainability agenda and we have sought to showcase some of the best examples of sustainable civil engineering.
Our objective has been to provide practical information on best practice for clients, designers, project managers, consultants and users. We hope that this will provide information with which readers may challenge some of the accepted norms of the industry in a bid to improve our environmental approach.
Sustainable development is seen as ‘a good thing’ but so often we pay lip service to it, either because we think that our clients will not see it as being in their interests or because we do not know what to do in a practical sense. This suite of papers should start to bridge that gap, demonstrating how practical improvements in sustainability can be achieved.
As an industry, we have a poor reputation for environmental awareness and this is deserved in part. By pointing to best practice and by adopting it more widely, we should improve our standing in society, in much the same way as Victorian engineers demonstrated their worth in tackling transport and sanitary problems.
One of our profession's roles is to see problems before they impact on society and to head them off. Can we do this with sustainability?
The collection of papers is opened by Sara Parkin in two scene-setting articles. The first sets out a definition of sustainability and explains why it is important to us. The second provides an overview of the growing regulatory framework and the network of initiatives promulgated by the UK government and others in addressing commitments made at Rio, Kyoto and elsewhere. Sara has also commissioned several other papers in this special issue.
Nick Raynsford provides a statement of the UK government's role in delivering sustainable construction and he considers the strategic plans now in place for the use of brownfield sites, transport, and for the development of new housing. This paper makes it clear that sustainability is at the heart of the government's policy towards the industry and underlines the need for best practice to be disseminated more widely in order to achieve the targets set for the UK.
The body of the suite of papers is made up of a series of reviews of particular subject areas. Bernard McNellis looks at renewable energy sources and makes predictions for the future technological winners in this field. Fred Dining argues that coal, far from being an outmoded energy source, has a future as a clean and efficient source of energy and he reviews some of the technology that makes this possible.
Horace Herring then points out that energy efficiency, in itself, is not a goal; but rather that fewer carbon dioxide emissions and other associated disbene-fits should be our objective. Horace goes on to point out some of the ways in which current policies encourage exactly the opposite of this objective.
In consideration of integrated transport policies, Stephen Joseph looks at alternatives to ever-increasing road provision and he argues that the civil engineering profession is not well set up to approach these new opportunities. Stephen points to ways of reducing the demand on infrastructure without reducing utility and he observes that few of these proposals require traditional engineering skills.
David Crookall and Will Bradford look at the impact of climate change on water resource planning and they explain how Severn Trent is dealing with the changes in its water supply base by using new sources of water and by reassessing the capacity of older sources. Quentin Leiper, Sally Riley and Paul Uren then provide an excellent study of the management of Carrillion's supply chain and they explain how sustainable buying polices are implemented in practice. They go on to pose difficult questions about how such a policy is to be turned to commercial advantage.
Finally, David Thom provides an entertaining review of the capacity of technology to save the world and he concludes that we have a moral purpose in seeing that the technological possibilities now available to us are put into practice to get more from less, to produce less waste and to avoid unnecessary consumption. In short, implementing sustainable development.
In assembling this review of practical sustainable development, we have found it very difficult to find material on examples of best practice; not because they do not exist but because there is currently insufficient interest in promoting them. The authors contributing to this journal should be congratulated on bringing together some extremely useful examples of best practice, but there is still a danger that this subject is too theoretical.
I therefore leave you with a challenge: review your current work and ask yourself if it is contributing any innovation to sustainable development. If it is (and I am sure that most will), please write a short article on the most innovative aspect and submit it for publication in a follow-up issue of Civil Engineering. If we are to save the world, we need to learn fast and the best way is to learn from each other.
My thanks go again to all the authors for their time and patience in preparing the papers, to the referees for reviewing them and to Sara Parkin in particular for her help in shaping this whole issue. Please note that the closing date for discussion contributions on all papers is 1 March 2001.
