Year
1968Duration
57 yearsCost
NALocation
GlobalProject achievements
Connected communities
Bringing together global engineering institutions
Environment benefitted
Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Used engineering skill
Offering courses to develop engineering skills
Bringing together engineering institutions from all around the world
The World Federation of Engineering Organisations (WFEO) was founded in 1968 in Paris with the help and support of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisations (UNESCO).
WFEO unites national engineering organisations from around 100 countries and represents more than 30 million engineers from around the world.
The non-governmental organisation (NGO) aims to develop and apply engineering to resolve global issues for the benefit of humanity.
It offers countries advice and guidance on engineering and technology policies, interests and challenges.
A key WFEO objective is to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through engineering. Its members, standing committees and working groups all support this target.
Committees include disaster risk management, engineering and the environment, energy, water, anti-corruption and women in engineering.
As part of its aim to make engineering information available globally, it launched the WFEO Academy in 2022.
Engineers aren’t very good at articulating the value of engineering and the impact that engineers and engineering have on society. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk about these aspects and engage the community in the work of engineers.
Dr Marlene Kanga, WFEO past president, speaking about World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development
Did you know …
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As part of World Engineering Day (WED) celebrations, WFEO hosts a Hackathon in partnership with UNESCO and Engineers Without Borders International (EWB-I).
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The annual competition invites participants to solve one of three exciting challenges, based on real-world scenarios, and create a short video to share their solution.
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The 2025 edition, in support of SDG 1: no poverty, saw 3,000 people from over 90 countries compete.
The ICE and WFEO
The ICE has been a member of WFEO since its first meeting in 1968.
From 1989-1997, under the secretary general Sir John McKenzie, WFEO shared the same HQ as the ICE, One Great George Street in London.
And from 2015-2023, the ICE hosted WFEO’s Committee on Engineering and the Environment (CEE), one of its key standing technical committees.
The ICE’s also been represented on its Energy STC and its Women in Engineering STC.
Each STC is tasked to focus on one or two SDGs. The CEE focuses on SDG 13: take urgent action to tackle climate change and its impacts.
WFEO launched its Declaration on Climate Emergency at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid in December 2019.
It urged all member organisations, including the ICE, to take decisive action to mitigate the causes and effects of climate change.
The declaration emphasises the importance of involving and empowering the most vulnerable categories of people across the world to face this crisis, stating that nobody must be left behind.
Climate stories
For World Engineering Day on 4 March 2021, the ICE commissioned a series of climate stories from across the globe.
It asked members of the CEE from Australia, Canada, China, France, Kenya and the UK to share their thoughts on their country’s climate change policies.
The ICE found that the contributors’ national governments had varying levels of acceptance when it came to the causes of climate change and how they should be mitigated.
For example, in Australia, some conservative groups and regional communities had a high economic dependency on resource industries favouring coal and gas, so may resist net zero targets.
Meanwhile, in China the government’s overall goal is to “have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060”.
Measures to reduce emissions also vary, from establishing independent advisory bodies in the UK to government-imposed carbon taxes in Canada.
These climate stories demonstrated the common themes of how engineers can address extreme weather events and temperature changes.
Many cited innovations and technology advances within the profession as being the main game changers.
