Following a request by the British Group, IABSE has joined over 70 structural engineering firms in declaring a climate emergency.
The campaign, spearheaded by the Happold Foundation, aims to unite engineering companies to ensure the sector is doing everything it can to minimise its impact on the environment.
Aims of the campaigns include; reducing material wastage, sharing knowledge, raising awareness of the climate and biodiversity emergencies, and introducing whole life carbon modelling into standard design processes.
Signatories are seeking to:
- Raise awareness of the climate and biodiversity emergencies and the urgent need for action among our clients, collaborators and supply chains
- Advocate faster change towards regenerative design practices and a higher governmental funding priority to support this
- Establish climate and biodiversity mitigation principles as a key measure of our industry’s success: demonstrated through awards, prizes and listings.
- Share knowledge and research to that end on an open source basis
- Evaluate all new projects against the aspiration to contribute positively to mitigating climate breakdown, and encourage our clients to adopt this approach
- Upgrade existing buildings for extended use as a more carbon efficient alternative to demolition and new build whenever there is a viable choice
- Include life cycle costing, whole life carbon modelling and post-occupancy evaluation as part of the basic scope of work, to reduce both embodied and operational resource use
- Adopt more regenerative design principles in practice, with the aim of providing structural engineering design that achieves the standard of net zero carbon
- Collaborate with clients, architects, engineers and contractors to further reduce construction waste
- Accelerate the shift to low embodied carbon materials in all work
- Minimise wasteful use of resources in engineering design
All firms are encouraged to join the declaration here.