When the Covid-19 pandemic hit we were given a glimpse of how the world could be. The air cleared. Nature returned to the cities. Forced to stop, people reconnected with their neighbourhoods and with each other. It was a chance to find a new path in the world and get away from a system that is so clearly failing so many people. Here we are, the richest civilisation in history, and so many people are miserable. But, instead of pivoting to focus on human development, we reverted to a focus on just one stage of the developmental cycle: economic growth. This, of course, gave us the pandemic in the first place as we encroached on the natural world and exposed ourselves to new pathogens. With no sign that this unsustainable and self-destructive encroachment will stop, we have to assume more pandemics will follow.
So what to do about it? We need to both take mitigating steps to reduce the likelihood of pandemics occurring and adapt our systems and built environment to adapt to a world where pandemics continue to pose a threat. This month, Engineering Sustainability covers both approaches.
We start with a briefing paper by Ian Mell on the need for ecological and social resilience in our urban spaces (Mell, 2023). Rather than technological solutions to stop the spread of disease, he argues we need to build resilience. Green infrastructure plays a vital role here, as access to green spaces helps maintain sanity in a locked-down world, and it also supports the natural systems that underpin ecological resilience which we need for a sustainable world. But leadership also plays a role: as engineering practitioners we know a lot of the technical solutions, but we can’t solve problems alone. We need good leadership and institutional memory to counter the disconnect between what we know and want to do, and what often happens under a business-as-usual approach that prioritises economic growth over ‘liveable, interactive and socioecologically sustainable places’ (Mell, 2023: p. 58).
Continuing the theme of green infrastructure, Ashley et al. (2023) discuss how the pandemic has led to high demand for blue-green spaces and nature-based solutions (NBS) in urban areas as people spend more time at home. NBS also, of course, support resilience to climate shocks, so are doubly important. To properly implement NBS, though, we need to rethink how we value nature, and to consider values beyond the merely financial, such as economic, environmental and social values. Noting there is no simple answer to this valuation, Ashley et al. discuss case studies from the EU Begin project and the UK’s Living with Water partnership.
Moving away from green infrastructure, O’Brien and MacAskill (2023) observe ‘tail risk’ scenarios such as the pandemic-exposed shortcomings in risk management protocols in critical infrastructure. In particular, cascading risks to systems, rather than direct risks to physical assets, led to disruptions that affected wide swaths of the economy. They argue that a more systems-based approach to thinking about risk, and a working culture that supports this is needed to achieve resilience, not only for events like pandemics, but for climate change and asset deterioration as well.
Closing out our focus on the pandemic, Idrissi Gartoumi et al. (2023) look at how building information modelling (BIM) can help the architecture, engineering and construction industry survive events such as global shutdowns. In Morocco, nearly 600 000 jobs were lost due to Covid-19, including 9000 in the construction industry. By helping improve efficiency and quality, and considering the trend in remote working, BIM can help insulate companies in this industry from these trends. Furthermore, by speeding up delivery from design to handover, BIM can help get critical infrastructure, such as hospitals, on line faster. Extrapolating this to the stresses we face in the coming years stemming from climate change and environmental degradation, this will be vital.
Our last two articles are not specifically about the pandemic, but the case can be made that Covid-19 is a result of how we interact with nature. Anything we do to improve our track record therefore reduces the risk of pandemics arising again. Kedir et al. (2023) discuss material efficiency in construction, specifically pre-fabrication of housing products in Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa. Their four main findings will be obvious to the readers of Engineering Sustainability. The interesting thing is why these findings are not more widely adopted and, to me, it comes back to how we value things: if we focus on financial results and not trying new approaches, we are bound to stay in our unsustainable rut.
Finally, Halbe and Adamowski (2023) discuss how the problems we face as engineers are multi-dimensional, with technical, ecological, economic and social aspects. As solving problems in isolation tends to create other problems downstream, we instead need a systems approach and, helpfully, they describe a three-step methodology to do this. This discussion is supported by a case study where this approach was applied to sustainable water management in Cyprus.
These papers raise important questions that, as an industry, we need to consider carefully. In particular, how and why do we assign value in decision making? Yes, the system is currently geared to financial return, but there’s no rule saying it has to be. Jon Erikson, in The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming our Future from the Fairytale of Economics (Erikson, 2022), makes this clear. Engineers build the world, so what we do matters. It’s not up to policymakers to stop the next pandemic, or help nature make a comeback. It’s up to us, in what we design, what we build and the choices we make. However, as the papers in this issue make clear, we can’t do it alone.
