ENGINEERING CHIEF ADDRESSES CONVENTION ON ACCELERATING INFRASTRUCTURE DELIVERY AND IMPROVING QUALITY OF LIFE
15 January 2010: Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) President, Professor Paul Jowitt, today addressed a conference of industry leaders, development organizations and built environment professionals on the challenges involved with delivering infrastructure in developing countries that satisfies social, economic and environmental imperatives.
The conference formed part of the Middle East and Africa Convention, taking place in Cape Town over this weekend (15th – 17th January). The event, with the theme ‘Accelerating Infrastructure Delivery – Improving the Quality of Life’ is hosted by the ICE Joint Division in South Africa (SAICE) led by ICE representative Mike Lomas.
During his speech the ICE President said: “There are growing international tensions for access to water, minerals and other scarce resources, we no longer have the moral freedom to power our way into the future by burning fossil fuels, and we are slipping towards an environmental catastrophe on a global scale.
“There are 1 billion people without access to safe water, 1.6 billion without electricity, 2.5 billion without adequate sanitation, 1 billion without access to telephone services and 1 billion rural poor without access to all-weather roads.
“Resolving all this will require tremendous innovation and ingenuity by engineers, working alongside other technical and non-technical disciplines”. He said.
Jowitt added that a ‘systems’ view of the world is needed and solutions at a systems level need to be developed to address the following two issues of truly global proportions.
- Engineering the world away from an environmental crisis
- Providing the infrastructure platform for an increasingly urbanised world and lifting a large proportion of the world’s growing population out of poverty.
He also talked about sustainability as a continuous process of maintaining a dynamic balance between the demands of people and what is ecologically possible.
He said: “Sustainable development is very much about eradicating poverty and is rooted in the simple concept of providing a better quality of life for all, now and for generations to come. It is a way of looking at all resources that will lead to a higher quality of life for the current generation, without compromising that of future generations.”
Other speakers at the conference included SAICE President, Ali Naidu and Peter Head OBE, of Arup.
Notes to Editors
A full version of Paul Jowitt’s speech is attached.
More details on today’s conference and the Convention can be found on the ICE Joint Division website: Robbie@rca.co.za Tel: +27 11 728 8173 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.