What being a Resilience Champion could do for your industry

The ICE, as the home of infrastructure, exists to improve lives by ensuring the world has the engineering capacity and infrastructure systems it needs to thrive.

As the planet faces unprecedented challenges, such as climate change and demographic shifts, civil engineers hold the skills to meet these head on.

It makes sense then that we’re also the place to recognise and celebrate those who are achieving and making progress in these areas.

That’s what the ‘Resilience Champions – building an inclusive and sustainable world’ initiative is about.

It will recognise the efforts of those working across the built environment sector to make their infrastructure projects resilient, sustainable and inclusive by design.

Why now?

Resilience Champions is a response to changes in the industry and an opportunity to drive further progress to deliver fairer benefits from infrastructure.

As an industry, and indeed as a society, we’re making moves to base our decisions on a wider view of benefits and a greater appreciation of those that we can help, now and in the future.

The Welsh government, for example, introduced the Well-being of Future Generations Act back in 2015.

The act requires public bodies in Wales to think about the long-term impact of their decisions.

This means choices are made with people and communities at their heart, so that problems such as poverty, climate change and health inequalities are addressed.

The ICE’s Resilience Champions is a response to this change in thinking towards better solutions with long-term benefits.

What being a Resilience Champion will mean

Resilience Champions will highlight where we’re doing a good job of considering sustainability, resilience and inclusivity in our projects and the decisions embedded in them.

The more we celebrate good examples, the more we can inspire others to see how they could provide a similar positive influence in their work.

We already do this with the ICE’s Carbon Champions initiative, which shares best practice in carbon reduction.

Often, it’s hard to see how much influence engineers can have on the direction of a project.

Many feel our hands are tied by existing processes, finances and governance, but the more examples we share, the more we realise the impact we can have.

We can get a clearer idea of how we can improve things even at later stages of a project’s development.

A move towards systems thinking

ICE Resilience Champions will be part of a team of leaders who are challenging and exploring ways we can do more.

We still work too much in silos, considering sustainability OR resilience OR inclusivity. But we can only achieve what’s needed if we consider all three together.

The industry is recognising the need to move towards systems thinking, and our champions will help navigate these new approaches through the lens of sustainability, resilience and inclusivity.

Being part of this core team, you’ll be engaging across the industry as these changes are required throughout and not just within certain sectors.

You’ll be given the opportunity to engage ICE leadership and the institution’s Community Advisory Boards and Knowledge Networks.

This project is being driven by incoming ICE President Anusha Shah and thus you’ll be helping deliver her core messages for the upcoming year.

What makes a Resilience Champion?

Our selection process will score you against various criteria, such as whether your project or role promotes sustainability, resilience and inclusivity, or just two of these factors.

In addition, those who demonstrate the project included metrics to measure success on these objectives will be scored higher.

Applicability to other projects and sectors will also gain a greater score.

Being recognised as a Resilience Champion will mark you as a leader in this field - someone who’s demonstrated how they’ve been delivering these ambitions and having a positive effect on the industry.

Get involved

I’m very excited about this initiative and hope we’re able to identify those who are pushing the boundaries in sustainability, resilience and inclusivity to improve how we deliver infrastructure.

Applications are open now.

I encourage you to think about your current or past projects and apply.

If you don’t think your projects meet the criteria, then I hope that leads to conversations in your workplace about what more you could be doing to address these important issues.

We all have a role to play in creating a sustainable, resilient and inclusive future – so let’s get moving.