Author: Alex Conacher

Partner: Mott MacDonald

In 2020 the weight of the built environment exceeded that of the total biomass. The weight of our buildings, bridges, vehicles, mobile phones and single use plastics massed in at 1.1 trillion tonnes, more than the weight of all animals and plants on the planet. Concrete, aggregates, brick, asphalt and metals account for the great majority of that and so the built environment has a massive and exponentially growing impact on the Earth.

Researchers who published their findings in the journal Nature give a horrifying warning. That at present rates of production, the mass of all the stuff that we make, consume and ultimately discard will have tripled by 2040, meaning that engineers are at the heart of the problem. Busily designing and building the infrastructure that society and the economy want and need, engineers are converting the Earth’s resources into manmade materials, driving climate change, contributing to a new era of mass extinction across the animal and plant kingdoms, and placing natural resources under unsustainable stress. Along with global health pandemics, they’re among the big, hairy, scary challenges highlighted in the 2021 Global Risks Report, published on 19 January by the World Economic Forum. 

But we’re not here to wallow in doom and gloom.

Engineering to save the world

There are many ways that engineers can help protect against risks to our environment, economy and society and undo some of the damage. From pandemic resilient infrastructure, interconnected systems, regenerative design, and artificial intelligence.

According to themost recent Global Risks Report, the top risks by likelihood are:

• Extreme weather, 
• Climate action failure
• Human environmental damage, 
• Infectious diseases, 
• Biodiversity loss, 
• Digital inequality. 

By impact the most severe risks are:

• Infectious diseases
• Climate action failure
• Weapons of mass destruction 
• Biodiversity loss 
• Natural resource crises
• Human environmental damage 
• Crises in people’s ability to sustain a livelihood.

Many risks are interconnected and looking back over the last decade, one major change has been the economic risks giving way to more environmental concerns. But there has been one big new entry: Unsurprisingly, the big, obvious risk on everyone’s mind following 2020 is the risk of infectious disease. It last took a prominent position in the 2015 report, as a result of the West African Ebola Outbreak, and now it is back with vengeance thanks to Covid-19. 

“It’s easy to forget about not just Ebola, but SARS, and MERS and avian flu, swine flu, there’s been a lot of outbreaks over the last couple of decades,” says Anthony Huszar, a former practising medical doctor who has transitioned into health resilience. He currently works as the Global Health Security Lead at Mott MacDonald. He recalls past epidemics which caused major economic impacts even in countries that escaped mass outbreaks and says that the 2021 report does not appreciate the threat fully. “I think the report says that there are new organisms every four months. The number of outbreaks is actually a lot higher than that in the real world. There are thousands of outbreaks,” 

Epidemics are frequent

Some of these are very small such as local food poisoning outbreaks, but there’s a lot that we don’t find out about as well. Interestingly, the World Health Organisation track about 200 epidemics per year. “And of those, most of them are controlled. So we don’t, we don’t hear about it so much in the mainstream media. But it gives you an idea of scale that that, you know, if you’ve got 200 epidemics at the World Health Organisation are tracking each year. You only need to get one lucky organism or one unlucky person jumping on a plane for this to turn into something quite big,” he says.

One of the downsides of our increased connectivity is that it allows viral spread, as does global warming and population growth. “So if things are warming up, a number of diseases come from animal origins, or at least rely on vectors,” says Anthony. “Insects that transmit diseases between organisms, or between species and the warmer it gets, the more insects you have and you know that that’s one reason you can also get more outbreaks with climate change.” 

In short, the risks of a health-related emergency are increasing from multiple factors. “And we’re more likely to see outbreaks on a on a larger scale. And that’s particularly true if we don’t invest in in preventing and preparing for the next big outbreak,” says Anthony. 

A lot of Anthony’s time is currently spent advising asset and building owners on possible trajectories for the coronavirus pandemic, reminding them that this could continue for some time, and looking at ways they can reduce risk. “We’re trying to get new buildings to think about flexibility and adaptability. So you might build a stadium, but it might potentially have a secondary function as a field hospital or as a rehabilitation centre or a vaccination centre, for example,” says Antony. 

Flexible designs that work for nature

The Nightingale Hospitals, created by converting stadia, arenas and exhibition centres, at the start of the Covid crisis, are a good example that flexibility in use that Anthony is working to build in to existing and new facilities. He’s also working to reconfigure buildings and infrastructure to reduce the risk of transmission and keep people safe.

This means working with colleagues like regenerative design leader Amanda Sturgeon, based in Australia. Her focus is on reducing the greatest long-term risk facing the planet – environmental risk. Regenerative Design is a way engineers have of going beyond sustainability. But fundamentally, it is about using data more effectively to make a positive environmental impact with everything we create.

“It’s really about generating more life. And bringing into balance, the relationship between nature and people,” says Amanda. “We design pretty well, usually, for people but we really lack the skills in terms of making them work for nature and ecology. And, you know, we’re running out of time to, you know, restore the ecology that we’ve been sort of pretty dead set on destroying and taking from for the last 50 years.” 

Infrastructure doesn’t have to be single-purpose, it can bring nature back into the built environment.

“Such as how could we rewild our cities? And how could we bring ecology into our rail projects, and how could we bring even more biodiversity to a train station then was there, you know, before the train station was built,” says Amanda.

Biophillic design

It’s about engineers using infrastructure and built environment projects as opportunities to counteract the negative impacts of all that manmade mass that consumes the planet. But Amanda is struck by another risk from the report – the damage being done to social cohesion and individual wellbeing. And she sees this as something Regenerative Design can help with. “The report outlines a breakdown of social cohesion, and a pandemic bringing a lot of fear into people’s lives daily. You know, I think we’ve, we’ve gotten to a place where we’re sort of looking to each other, aren’t we to solve the societal problems, instead of looking at the planet as a whole, and looking at all other living systems that are placed within them. So I guess I’m very much a proponent of, you know, this connection to nature, and, you know, the ability to really be part of an ecology actually really being positive for our social cohesion as well.”

This is known as biophilic design, connecting people and nature in the built environment. “If people spend an hour in nature, they’re 20%, more productive. There’s been other studies that have looked at, you know, people healing faster, just if they have access to windows,” says Amanda.

For 50 years we have been building offices, factories and hospitals that don’t even allow people natural light through the day. “It’s a pretty basic thing. We do actually like to have natural light! And then our brain functions better,” says Amanda. But a lack of social equity, highlighted by the pandemic, means that people are not getting access to spaces outside the city to be immersed in the wilderness, or have a chance to go on a holiday and be immersed in nature. 

In some cases, we have had wins completely by accident. Rail corridors become unintended green corridors as vegetation grows along the verges but what if we created these links as green corridors by design, connecting people and nature. It’s an example of systems thinking – awareness of connections, interdependencies, and cause and effect relationships; protection against negative unintended consequences and the pursuit of positive intentional ones. 

“If you were thinking about it traditionally, engineers would say yes, we build bridges. But I actually do think that engineers build bridges, they build a connection,”saysJohn Carstensen, the Climate Resilience Lead for Mott MacDonald, who has spent years thinking about systems and how you can make them work better for people and the environment. “The real importance is the delivery of the service that connects people and that means you have to think about how that that bridge works for the people who are using it and how it’s connecting people how it is connecting trade, how it can help to prevent the climate change impacts if there is flooding or landslides or, or similar things.” 

Shaping resilient cities

The relationship between infrastructure assets and the service they provide to people – and the risks to both from climate change impacts – is illustrated by work ongoing to restore New York’s Subway lines following Hurricane Sandy nearly a decade ago, in 2012.”This was a major shock to all of us… in 2012, there was Hurricane Sandy, which became Superstorm Sandy, essentially, the hurricane was swept inland by another low that was coming across the continental United States. And that created an enormous storm and run up,” says Professor Tom O’Rourke, the Thomas R. Briggs Professor in Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University, and an expert in engineering infrastructure resilience.

“There was a rise in the water table of about 12 feet, which inundated Lower Manhattan, we never thought we would see Lower Manhattan underwater, it’s quite significant,” he explains. This of course had a tremendous impact on the infrastructure there. “There were 23 separate tunnels flooded. And to this day, we’re still working on the rehabilitation of some of these tunnels.”

The salt water got entrained within the tunnel structures and nd it’s incredibly hard to get out, actually impossible to get out on short term notice that they have to return the system to operation. So basically, the systems get returned, but they’re not quite fully functional, and they get less functional with time. “I was involved a lot with the Governor Cuomo of New York State, on the L-line, tunnels, rehabilitation for those.”

As Tom says, after four weeks of intense work, much of the Subway was back in operation. “They were responsible for about 250,000 riders per day, and they were going to be closed for about 15 to 18 months. And that was politically untenable. So we worked a solution to keep them open. But they’re a good demonstration of the fact that that the hurricane was in 2012, the repair was in 2020.”

Eight years after the event, they’re still being rehabilitated and New York’s commuters are feeling the disruption caused by it. The Subway’s lack of resilience all those years ago is still costing New Yorkers time, as well as costing the operator money. It is a lesson focusing investment today.

Futureproofing transport

In New York City, the major projects, for example, the Gateway project, which is the perhaps largest infrastructure project for the United States is to build new tunnels for Amtrak to carry commuter traffic across the Hudson River into New York City, and take lots of cars off the road. And currently, it’s being driven by the concern with respect to flooding. The new tunnels, known as the Gateway programme, are costing about $13 billion – but are calculated to keep New York moving if, or when, another Superstorm strikes. The hope is that new technology may go some way to helping reduce the costs of building resilience. That digital revolution coming to our aid again. This is Mark Enzer, Mott MacDonald’s chief technical officer and Head of the National Digital Twin programme at the Centre for Digital Built Britain. “There is massive opportunity to drive for better outcomes for people and society and for nations, by using our systems better. And recognising that connection between the system of systems, that is the built environment, then we’ve built it and we connected it up and we need a way of using it the best we can.”

Mark says that we now have digital tools that enable us and help us to manage complex systems. So that’s what we should be doing is designing those tools to help us to get the very best out of what we’ve got in the service of people. “It’s by starting with the end in mind, which is these desirable outcomes. And then kind of, in some ways working back, what do we have to do to run our systems in a way that delivers those outcomes? Therefore, what kind of digital tools do we need to enable us and to design good tools to do good things?”

And one of these tools that Mark puts forward, is digital twins, which regular listeners will be fully familiar with by now. Moving from modelling systems to feeding real time data in. “Very often those models are fed by offline data. And what we can start to do now is connect the model up to the thing that it’s modelling so that you get a data connection or dynamic data connection between the physical world and the digital world. That then means that the models are directly modelling the thing that’s happening at that at that time.”

And we can also imagine connecting the digital twins up so that you can get an ecosystem of connected digital twins. 

“This is something that, that we kind of have to do,” says Mark. “Particularly, I think, if, if we’re now in this state, where, you know, the total mass of the built environment exceeds the biomass then we’ve got to manage it properly. And because it’s become so interconnected, it becomes absolutely imperative that we manage it as a system.”