By Susan Krumdieck
On the way to building the sustainable world, transition engineers respond to risks, not disasters. Transition engineering will emerge as the way by which society reduces both fossil fuel use and the detrimental social and environmental impacts of industrialization.
The most enduring legacy of the Brundtland Commission (1983-1987) has been a simple definition of sustainable development: “Ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Since that time, this definition has not been challenged, but it has also not found application in engineering practice.
Although nearly all of the environmental threats identified were the result of engineered systems, the engineering profession was not mentioned in the report. It is hard to set up requirements for engineering projects that involve the moral issues of our own needs weighed against needs of others in poor countries and those in the future when they have no legal representation or economic participation.
Sustainability can be effectively addressed by the emergence of a new field: transition engineering. This is a parallel of safety engineering but with a longer time scale, broader space scale, and more complex relationship scale.
There is limited evidence that the philosophical, anthropological, or economic arguments of the past 40 years regarding sustainability have had a great impact on engineering education or the professional discipline. One project-based approach to sustainability that has emerged is The Natural Step (TNS), which focuses on education of people in organizations about the conditions of sustainability.
The first rule of engineering is “define the problem.” It is not a great surprise that the engineering professions have spent the past 20 years essentially going about business as usual. Growth is the problem definition for engineers in industry.
Like many other sustainability-motivated engineers, I have spent years working on “green” technologies that are perpetually 10 years away from technical or economic viability. In a few engineering fields, notably air pollution and waste management, the goal to reduce environmental and health impacts of industrial pollution has seen great progress. But diligent work by people who thought the problem was developing cost-effective green energy alternatives has not improved the overall sustainability of the non-green energy sectors.
There is a sense that the engineering professions are waiting for society, and more importantly the economy, to define sustainability in ways that can be included in the requirements for development projects.
Business-as-usual engineered industrial systems and products continue to increase the risks of unsustainable energy use and pollution. Now is the time for engineers to stop waiting and begin planning the transition to sustainability.
As we’ve learned from safety engineering, you can’t make anything inherently safe; you can only think ahead to reduce as many risks as you can within the budget you have. This is the way we can approach sustainability. We can’t make a sustainable car, but we can think about the risks to car-based transport systems and work on changes to reduce exposure to these risks.
The idea is that sustainability could one day become an element of standard practice in the same way that safety engineering has over the past 100 years. Transition engineering is proposed as the general practice of changing existing engineered systems to reduce the risks of unsustainable resource use or pollution. The engineering professions, at some point in the future, will take up transition engineering as part of standard practice. Transition engineering will have discipline-specific methods, but will be practiced across many disciplines.
Reducing the Risks of Unsustainability
The history of safety engineering shows that the transition to safety was initiated through conscientious engineering, not through policy leadership or economic signals. Safety engineers develop standards for new equipment and practices, then these standards are enforced by policy and regulation, and finally the economic benefits are understood.
The current debates around sustainability of energy systems tend to focus on policy and economics, which has not delivered demonstrable progress in reducing unsustainability risks. The conclusion of the argument is that currently practicing engineers can conscientiously begin the projects of transition because society values survival and can adapt to change.
You don’t need to engineer for sustainability. You need to engineer to reduce and eliminate the risks of unsustainability. Now we can all get to work on the transition.
Survival has three-dimensional scales of time, location, and relationship, as shown in Figure 1, “The Survival Spectrum.” Individuals survive another day or another year if their immediate habitats, transport systems, and workplaces have a good degree of safety. Human organizations and towns will survive if the supply of resources and trade goods is secure, and if they are not hit by a natural disaster or war. Security is a longer-term survival issue, on the scale of lifetimes or generations.
Gradual changes in climate and global systems, both human and natural, will either drive adaptations or they will induce decline and collapse. One might even postulate a simple “Law of Survival”, which states that survival in the long term, known as sustainability, is either achieved through adaptation or it is not. Resource use, energy use, agriculture, technology, values, and behaviors adapt so that the civilization’s activity systems fit with what is available. Or they fail and are replaced by different activity systems, or different civilizations.
Adaptive changes for survival represent a balance between benefit and risk. At any given time, individuals and populations have particular characteristics that are the result of cumulative historical adaptations. These characteristics include everything from language, knowledge, tradition, religion, and shared cultural values to technology, infrastructure, skills, domesticated species, and materials. There cannot be any adaptive change without taking some kind of risk.
But changes that are made to a successful set of characteristics could pose a risk by changing things in unforeseen ways. Industrial history is full of these unintended consequences, and they are usually on a different scale than the benefits. Benefits of a change or development are usually immediate and local, but the negative consequences may affect people in other regions, later generations, or other species, or they may accumulate over time on a global scale.
Accurate modeling and communication by transition engineers who find ways to include complex systems connections in their risk–benefit analysis will be vital to the successful adaptation of our activity systems in this century.
Using the different time scales in the Survival Spectrum, I propose that engineering analysis, modeling, and design can innovate adaptations to reduce the risks of unsustainability to man-made systems.
The Role of Engineering in Survival
The problems of unsustainability have been obvious for many years. The engineering professions have responded by pursuing innovation and development in clean energy and clean technologies. There have been many successful developments, like particulate emissions control on coal power plants and alternative refrigerants that don’t deplete stratospheric ozone.
But even with all of the clean technology improvements conceivable, industrial society as we know it will have to change dramatically to adapt to reductions in fossil fuels consumption and depletion of resources. According to the Law of Survival, the activity systems dependent on continuous growth of consumption will thus either adapt to the decline of consumption or they will fail.
Transition engineering will involve changing existing complex systems to enable them to adapt and survive. The problem definition in all fields will include constraints on energy and materials supplies and constraints on environmental and social impacts.
Engineering to constraints is not a problem when only technology considerations are involved. But because of the complex nature of the energy and material systems, behavior, politics, economics, and social values are also involved. How can engineers from every discipline possibly take on projects that significantly change the way things are done when there are not direct regulatory or market drivers? The answer is simple: It is the right thing to do.
This is a shocking statement to make today, when the prevailing wisdom is that economic benefit is the motivation for all decision making and the reason for all actions. However, the idea that the engineering professions can take up transition engineering in response only to the signal of social expectations (and not economic or political signals) is critical.
And there is precedent in the history of safety engineering, after the tragic loss of 146 workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in March 1911. There was no government policy or support in favor of the subsequent formation of the United Society of Casualty Inspectors. Its 62 founding members took action in response to the public outrage over the deadly fire because they thought it was the right thing to do.
In 2000, a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration study found that every $1 spent on safety saves $4–$6, but the money saved is not the reason for good safety practice. It is the result. Professional engineers include safety in design and operating considerations because it is expected by society. The public trusts engineers to work for their safety, but within the context of sensible costs and reasonable measures.
Today, on the whole, professional engineers follow safety standards, when 100 years ago they did not, and the main motivation for this shift is stated in the American Society for Safety Engineers’ code of professional conduct: The “duty to serve and protect people, property and the environment … is to be exercised with integrity, honor and dignity.” It is the right thing to do.
Transition Engineering Defined
Transition engineering is the research, modeling, development, and application of state-of-the-art knowledge to bring about changes in existing engineered systems in order to improve the odds of survival by reducing risks to safety, security, and sustainability. These changes are largely adaptations of existing systems rather than additions to them.
Transition engineering projects focus on reducing the risks of unsustainable energy use, resource consumption, environmental impacts, and social conditions, while developing opportunities that arise from long-term secure investments and innovations.
In most cases, transition engineering work is much more about working with different levels of government, businesses, and different sectors of the community to develop the understanding and knowledge about the issues and to identify and launch specific change projects. This necessarily means that transition engineering work should fit the model for achieving sustainable outcomes shown in Table 1. As with change projects in industry, many of the capabilities to design and develop the changes are already available in the engineering disciplines, but major challenges lie in managing the stakeholder communications and the changes of attitudes and expectations and the established patterns of human behavior.
Table 1: Attributes of Successful Sustainability Transition Change Projects| Engage participation | - Active engagement
- Hands-on process
- Visual knowledge
- Creative thinking tools
- Attention to decision making
|
| Beneficial synergies across scale | - Cross-scale principles
- Transferable tools
- Meta data structure
- Link multiple geographical scales
- Link multiple time and social scales
|
| Integrated and sustainable outcomes | - Sustainability focus
- Explicit sustainability criteria
- Focus on social capital
- Focus on environmental integrity
- Combines different perspectives
- Holistic approach
|
| Eco-systemic (upstream not tailpipe) solutions | - Spatial design and analysis
- Ecological design principles
- Ecological/Human interaction
- Focus on underlying process
- Structured design process
- Life-cycle design
|
| Develop stakeholder capacity | - Explicit skills development
- Incorporated education
- Use of multiple intelligences
- Attention to program development
|
| Source: Joanne Tippett et al., Progress in Planning, January 2007. |
Several of the aspects of the model for successful sustainability transition projects involve good design. However, the engineer new to sustainability should notice that engagement and working with people is key. Also important is learning of all the people involved and developing new capabilities through the process.
Conceptual Framework for Transition Engineering
Figure 2 provides the overview of the steps and processes involved in transition engineering of complex systems. The basic process definitions, processes and interactions would be familiar to the change manager or the product developer, but this diagram is tailored for communication outside the engineering field.
The first steps involve auditing records, monitoring, and conducting scientific investigation to understand where the problems have developed.Scenario thinking is used to explore possible future trends and to identify unacceptable risks of continuing business as usual without remedial changes.
The fourth step, generating path-break concepts, is mostly the work of research and innovation, but in the case of safety engineering may have also included expression of a key idea, the preventability of failures—e.g., deaths in factory fires. Thetrigger in the case of factory worker safety was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire tragedy. Similar trigger events can be traced for other safety areas and security initiatives.
Back-casting points out what could have been done differently and what measures would most immediately reduce safety risks. Once on the path of preventing injury and death, the safety engineering experience shows that progress toward a safe workplace involves many types of projects in all types of complex situations. However, we also see that the progress can be rapid and the transition remarkable when the engineering is done from a leadership position in response to social outrage over a failure in the existing system. The final part of the transition is the enforcement of the new standards, training, and equipment through policy and regulation.
The transition process can occur organically after a disaster event triggers action. But clearly the point of transition engineering (like safety engineering) is to perform risk analysis to identify potential disasters beforethey occur, and then proceed through the processes of engagement, integration, and engineering of eco-systemic solutions that can be implemented through change projects.
Examples of Transition Engineering Development
Natural hazards engineering and environmental engineering are two examples of fields where transition engineering has been working.
The Rhine River basin is a complex system: The river flows 1,320 km through nine countries and is the major transportation corridor for western Europe. Recently, local and regional scales have been integrated into the traditionally more top-down management of the Rhine River water resource in Germany. Through increasing participation, local stakeholders and the general public are recognizing their own roles in protecting the water resources that form an important part of the quality of life and economic activity for 58 million people.
The Rhine River has a long history of being severely exploited for navigation and as both a source of water supply and a place for waste disposal for industries and cities. By the 1970s, the river was declared virtually biologically dead by scientists in Germany. In 1986, a fire at the Sandoz chemical plant in Basel discharged large amounts of detergent into the river, resulting in massive fish kills.
This disaster provided the trigger point for public outrage over the condition of the river, and the Rhine Action Plan was developed to set a number of targets to reduce pollution discharge from factories and increase biodiversity. Setting discharge limits was an effective way to get the change projects under way at the chemical processing and manufacturing plants.
Clearly it was possible to do the research and development needed to reengineer the industrial operations to dramatically reduce pollution discharge, but the investment in the change projects required the trigger of a disaster and the public outrage. Over the past several decades, the field of environmental engineering has advanced as a discipline. Research and development of green processing and manufacturing is now often carried out in response to risks rather than disasters.
While industrial discharges into the Rhine have been greatly reduced, polluted flows from farmland have increased with industrial farming practices, and contaminated rainwater discharge from urban areas is limiting the full recovery of the river. The integrated management processes that have developed to address the industrial discharges are now being employed to identify risks, develop solutions, and find ways to economically implement the changes in agriculture and urban wastewater without having to experience a disaster first.
Our research group has also been following the processes for transition engineering in transportation. Safety engineering in transportation systems is a mature field; it advances in response to disasters in order to meet regulatory requirements, and because there are engineers who think it is the right thing to do. Research and development for emissions reduction has been addressing health risks to people in densely populated cities for several decades. However, the risks of peak and decline of conventional oil supply have not been studied in transportation engineering.
In the past (Step 1 in Figure 2), research demonstrating the adverse health effects of lead exposure and urban smog have led to removal of lead from fuel and to the development of emission control systems—decidedly a “tailpipe” solution. The OPEC oil embargo and oil shortages in the 1970s spurred development of more fuel-efficient vehicles. Thus, there have been some reactive changes to past triggers, but the inherent unsustainability of the fossil-fueled transportation systems of the world make this an attractive subject for study.
Interestingly, there is a discipline of sustainable transportation engineering. Its main objectives are to develop public transport and encourage behavioral change, so that travel demand can continuously increase. The objective of sustainable transportation engineering is managing congestion, which is seen to have negative economic impacts, increase air pollution, and cause public outrage. Defining sustainability for transportation for modern urban areas and freight systems is definitely a problem.
It is not difficult to understand the risks to the current transportation systems (Step 2). Oil-supply disruption represents the biggest risk to the reliability of transportation and the activities that depend on transportation. Fossil carbon emissions to the atmosphere; conflict over control of oil supplies; environmental damage from oil extraction, refining, and oil spills; and eventual depletion of the affordable oil and bitumen resources to run the existing transport systems all pose risks to the continuity or survival of people, businesses, and essential activity systems and trade networks.
The most critical risks and issues arise from the profligate and exclusive use of fossil oil in transport and economic systems that have almost no resilience to reduced supply.
When we examine future scenarios (Step 3), we reach the same conclusions as many other analysts. The era of cheap oil is coming to an end, and there are no alternative fuels that can substitute for even a small fraction of the declining oil supply. Oil resources such as tar sands and coal conversion to liquids have much higher environmental impacts, are increasingly expensive, and have lower energy returns on investment. New vehicle uptake has a much longer response time than oil-supply disruptions or price spikes.
Any future scenario that has continued growth of travel demand and does not involve reduction of demand for fossil transport fuels would still face serious reliability and sustainability risks.
The path-break concept generation process (Step 4) involves analyzing the existing urban form to assess the adaptive capacity of the population and the minimum energy footprint of the underlying geography. The travel-adaptive capacity is assessed by a novel personal travel audit and mode option survey method. The goal is quantitative assessment of a range of policy, development, investment, infrastructure, and technology options to reduce fuel use over time to mitigate the fuel-supply risks.
The backcasting and re-visioning (Step 5) can be facilitated by conducting a strategic analysis of complex systems. This method recognizes that all of the stakeholders have a range of ideas about development options. The analyst creates a matrix of these possibilities, calculates the energy-demand-reduction potential, and assesses the costs and the risks to produce the matrix of opportunities.
This method has been used successfully in a transition engineering project for the City of Dunedin in New Zealand. The method takes what seem to be untenable or “wicked” problems of unsustainable systems and provides viable and attractive development options.
The process of initiating (Step 6) and carrying out the identified options (Step 7) depends on well-designed active engagement processes. This involves carrying out the integrated management approach with the participant engagement as illustrated earlier in Table 1.
With students and post-doc researchers from the group, I have conducted a workshop with a group of 52 participants in the small town of Oamaru, New Zealand, to develop community-transition projects. TheTransitionscape workshop was designed according to the model in Table 1 and was successful in generating several long-running projects in the community that increased resilience to oil-supply issues.
A new trigger event for reducing oil consumption may have occurred on April 20, 2010, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform initiated one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of fossil fuel production.
There is no question that oil spills, flaring, and groundwater pollution have been continuous and locally disastrous over the past 70 years. Until this point, like factory worker deaths in 1911, these environmental disasters were the price of progress and were tolerated in the face of powerful business and political interests. Hopefully, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was a big enough disaster, and a larger one—like a nuclear power plant meltdown, or massive environmental destruction from tar sand mining and processing—will not be required as the trigger for the initiation of a transition to sustainable energy.
Transition Engineering for LongTerm Survival
Transition engineering is proposed as a new field that addresses the long-term survival of complex, democratic, industrial societies. Transition engineering has begun to emerge in response to realizations of environmental degradation and resource depletion.
For Further Reading: Papers by Susan Krumdieck
Dale, M., S. Krumdieck, P. Bodger, “Net Energy Yield from Production of Conventional Oil,” Energy Policy, Vol. 39, Issue 11 (2011) 7095 -7102.
Krumdieck, S., M. Dale, S. Page, “Design and Implementation of a Community Based Sustainable Development Action Research Method,” Social Business, Vol. 2 (2012) 291-337.
Krumdieck, S., and A. Hamm, “Strategic Analysis Methodology for Energy Systems with Remote Island Case Study,” Energy Policy, Vol. 37,9 (2009) 3301-3313.
Krumdieck, S., S. Page, A. Dantas, “Urban Form and Long Term Fuel Supply Decline: A Method to Investigate the Peak Oil Risks to Essential Activities,” Transportation Research Part A, Vol. 44 (2010) 306-322.
Rendall, S., S. Page, F. Reitsma, E. van Houten, S. Krumdieck, “Quantifying Transport Resilience: Active Mode Accessibility,” Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Vol. 2242 (2011) 72-80.
Watcharasukarn, M., S. Krumdieck, R. Green, and A. Dantas, “Researching Travel Behavior and Adaptability: Using a Virtual Reality Role-Playing Game,” Simulation & Gaming, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2011) 100-117. http://dx.doi .org/10.1177/1046878110366070
Watcharasukarn, M., S. Krumdieck, S. Page, “Virtual Reality Simulation Game Approach to Investigate Transport Adaptive Capacity for Peak Oil Planning,” Transportation Research Part A, Vol. 46 (2012) 348–367.
Survival is an absolute condition defined by its failure, not by any particular characteristics. It is accomplished by the mechanism of adaptation.
Just like safety, sustainability cannot be defined except by failures, but engineering can reduce the risks to survival by preventing failures. The historical perspective on safety illustrates how economic or market signals are important in normal operation, but not effective or sufficient signals for survival. Transition engineering focuses on identifying unsustainable aspects of current systems, assessing the risks posed by those aspects, and researching and developing ways to mitigate and prevent systemic failures through adaptations.
No further time should be wasted trying to define sustainability, because the Survival Spectrum shows how addressing unsustainability, and in particular preventable failures, is the top priority for transition engineering projects. Already, critical transition engineering projects today are reducing energy and materials demands in order to improve resilience and mitigate risks.
Engineers in all disciplines could begin working on these projects according to the same drivers as safety engineers—because it needs doing. Waiting for government leaders to find solutions or for the market to send the right signals would present a high risk of system failure—otherwise known as collapse.
About the Author
Susan Krumdieck is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. She will be participating (online) in a panel on this topic at WorldFuture 2013 in Chicago. She may be contacted at susan.k...@canterbury.ac.nz.
This article draws from a paper she presented at the 2011 meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and used with permission of ASME, www.asme.org.
The author would like to acknowledge the more than 20 postgraduate students and the many colleagues who over the past 12 years have participated in sustainability transition research with so much passion and commitment.
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