Engineers failing to challenge carbon-intensive practices will be ‘unethical’ by 2035

Failing to stand up to carbon-intensive practices will be deemed unethical, if not illegal, by 2035, engineers say.

The ICE and the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE) brought together asset owners, designers and contractors to discuss the common ethical dilemmas they face regarding the climate crisis.

Many of them shared that they need more support to do the right thing within their organisations.

“It’s the responsibility of engineers to challenge the [status quo] up and down the value chain,” said Lewis Barlow, the ICE’s trustee for climate and carbon and decarbonisation technical director for WSP in the UK.

But he recognised that system-level barriers are holding back professionals from doing what they know is the right thing.

“The PAS 2080 approach was developed to help tackle these issues,” he said, referring to the carbon management standard for buildings and infrastructure.

The support available to help the industry do the right thing

Some engineers said that they’d been feeling isolated and that they needed support to stand up for the right choices.

Engineers getting together to discuss the industry’s climate-related ethical problems more often would help with this, said Paula McMahon, ICE trustee for professional conduct.

They can use the ICE and IStructE document Guidance notes for delivering your own rethinking engineering ethics climate roundtable to frame their discussions.

McMahon encouraged the groups to share key findings from their discussions via the ICE’s Ethics Committee webpage, to inform further work in this area.

“With a view to having some of these issues put into law,” she said.

Key ethical challenges

Other climate dilemmas that the industry members said they were struggling with today, that they predicted would be ethically or legally unacceptable by 2035, included:

• The sector’s tendency to use overengineered solutions by default.
• The sector’s lack of reuse, ignoring materials’ circularity potential.
• The sector’s risk-averse preference for traditional materials over less carbon-intensive alternatives.
• The failure of procurement policies to encourage the use of lower-carbon materials and methods.
• The sector’s patchy understanding and application of carbon accounting and reporting.
• The continued short-term outlook of the sector’s investment decision-making, which is holding back the uptake of lower-carbon solutions.

Will Arnold, the IStructE’s head of climate action, has explored the discussions in more depth in an article that’s freely accessible to ICE members.

How standards and laws can support engineers

Several roundtable participants also noted that contracts still rarely require all parties to a project to work to PAS 2080. That’s despite the UK Department for Transport gradually requiring the standard to be followed throughout the supply chain.

Meanwhile, Part Z is the proposed amendment to UK Building Regulations 2010 that would make embodied carbon reporting mandatory on new builds.

Backed by industry bodies including the ICE and IStructE, this would also address some of the systemic barriers by ensuring that the overall carbon impacts of building developments are considered.

The series of roundtable discussions, which were held under the Chatham House Rule, posed the question: what climate dilemma are you struggling with today that will be ethically or legally unacceptable by 2035?

Their responses were analysed at a recent ICE Strategy Session.

Watch the recording