engineers’
manifesto
Environmental declarations aim to transform ideology into action. Their corporate
popularity holds out hope for change
Over the past year,
environmental activism
has ramped up a
notch or two in the UK.
Environmental campaigner
Greta Thunberg has encouraged young
people and others to leave school and
work to march. Pressure group Extinction
Rebellion has brought the environment
home through campaigns of civil
disobedience.
The corporate world has not been
unaffected. In particular, more than a
thousand companies and organisations
have signed up to public petitions for
architects, building services engineers,
civil engineers and structural engineers.
The latter three declarations have been
supported by The Happold Foundation.
“The twin crises of climate breakdown
and biodiversity loss are the most serious
issue of our time,” the declarations state.
“For everyone working in the construction
industry, meeting the needs of our society
without breaching the earth’s ecological
boundaries will demand a paradigm shift in
our behaviour.”
Signatories – who must have CEO or
board member approval before being listed
– commit to a list of 11 action statements,
including raising awareness of the urgent
need for action; advocating and adopting
regenerative design practices; evaluating
new projects on climate change mitigation
criteria; incorporating lifecycle costing in
basic scope of work; shifting to low-carbon
materials; collaborating with partners to
reduce construction waste.
For Arup building engineering team
sustainability expert Mel Allwood, “Global
demographic and lifestyle changes
continue increasing demand for resources
at an unprecedented and unsustainable
rate,” she contends. The company
has signed up to all four documents.
“A regenerative design mindset is
transformative. It asks us to exchange
the traditional ways of managing time and
space for a clear focus on natural capital
as the priority.”
Architectural practice Stanton Williams,
a founding signatory of Architects Declare,
goes even farther. “For us, sustainable
design is an integral part of good design.
No building, space or place can be
considered well-designed if it does not
contribute to environmental, social and
economic sustainability. Conversely, no
building, space or place can be considered
sustainable if it is not well designed.”
What exactly is, and isn’t, sustainable,
remains a hotly contested topic, according
to Stephen Barrett, partner of architecture
rm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. “As
Jonathon Porritt once said, ‘There is no
such thing as sustainable development,
only more or less sustainable
development’. How anything is built,
how we continue to have development
and growth, without any environmental
impact in construction and/or in use, is
a signi cant challenge. There is no doubt
that we will all have to go far further.”
One simple change is to reuse existing
buildings, rather than knocking them down
and rebuilding them. “Current business
models do not incentivise maintaining
the value of assets and materials
over time,” states Allwood.
Waste management and
THE
10
“Business does not incentivise
maintaining the value of assets
and materials over time”
Mel Allwood