I’ve set three ambitious yet attainable challenges for my year as president of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) – challenges that I believe are relevant to every member of our profession and vital to its future.
These include harnessing three things: the skills and talent of our engineers and future engineers; new sources of sustainable energy from our natural resources; and the energy of our partnerships with industry and government, so that the frameworks are in place to achieve a prosperous future.
A global economic downturn, European debt crisis and continuing domestic austerity must temper these aspirations with a pragmatic dose of realism.
A delicate balance
A quarter of our electricity-generating capacity is coming offline over the next decade. This must be replaced by low-carbon alternatives, many of which rely on technologies still in their infancy.
We face a delicate balancing act: to swiftly reduce our carbon emissions while keeping the lights on and ensuring quality of life. This must be achieved within the context of a changing energy sector and the needs of an expanding population that is creating an upward pressure on diminishing resources.
I don’t believe it is an exaggeration to say that meeting our carbon emissions target represents the greatest peacetime mobilisation of society in our time.
Working together
At the heart of this initiative sits the concept of partnership. The relationship between government and industry is evolving through the framework of Infrastructure UK, a partnership between HM Treasury and the ICE.
The Treasury’s National Infrastructure Plan (NIP) contains a frank acknowledgement that the UK has suffered from short-termism towards infrastructure, and has been timid, unco-ordinated, incremental and wasteful in supporting sustainable growth in the economy. Yet I see this honest assessment as a gilt-edged 
opportunity for our industry to step up its game and take a lead role. The government’s NIP and Plan for Growth point the collective way forward, by formally recognising infrastructure as a fundamental building block of economic prosperity and social progress.
Underpinning any aspirations is an imperative to demonstrate value for money, primarily by achieving more for the same within the marketplace. Laing O’Rourke’s Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) programme is an excellent example of a proactive response to this challenge. Companies that continually strive to improve both the quality and consistency of their outputs are setting the benchmarks against which the wider construction industry must ultimately be judged.
Life-long learning
Training and development provide the mechanism that will deliver these goals. Professional qualification must be treated as an integral aspect of a sustainable engineering future, not an optional extra. Through its Royal Charter, the Institution has a clear role to provide “a ready means… of ascertaining that persons by proper training and experience are qualified to carry out such work”.
No one would sign up for an operation by an unqualified surgeon any more than they would board a plane flown by an unregistered pilot. Civil engineers have a duty of care to society – and by direct association, a responsibility to demonstrate that professional competence.
We inhabit a paradoxical world where growing global centres of population must be sustained by apparently diminishing resources. Resolution rests with our emerging generation of engineers.
Our planet has recently welcomed its seven billionth current living citizen, destined to learn one of its many thousand dialects. As engineers, we should take pride that we alone articulate the shared language of this world’s physical design.