Engineering and Community Resilience through Sustainability

Abstract

If COVID19 showed us anything, it was that in the face of adversity, all people are equal on earth, regardless of wealth, status or power. People can be resilient in the face of adversity, but resilience is strengthened by the social system that supports them through adversity. A system’s resilience is its capacity to tolerate disturbances while retaining its structure and function (Fiksel, 2006, p. 16). Resilience is inherent in sustainability provided equilibrium is maintained in all its domains (cultural, social, environmental and by default economic). This equilibrium needs to be established as an everyday norm, sustainability needs to become the new fait accompli replacing long held assumptions on the need for unrestrained economic growth. Controlled and sustainable urban development that is decentralised, scrutinised through evidence-based monitoring and born in collaboration with educated and informed communities and citizens are some of the processes being developed to implement global sustainability agendas at the local level (Bizzotto & ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, 2018; Yuzva & Zimmermann, 2012). Despite the overabundance of excellent stakeholder engagement at the local level, implementation of local sustainability requires more - it requires community ownership and responsibility for long term local sustainability. Community Sustainability Frameworks (CSFs) are one avenue to assist in drawing together transdisciplinary experience to harness the complexity of social change at the local level. Engineers are part of this transdisciplinary approach, working alongside local communities to development CSFs to guide progress towards sustainability. Critical thinking, a key requirement of social change towards sustainability, is the forté of engineers. They have the potential to assist communities and local governments to understand the challenge of providing deeply differentiated and context-specific actions required to achieve the global sustainability agenda at the local level. To assist engineers in this role the establishment of a Community of Practice of Engineers for Sustainability is proposed with a specific focus on engineers becoming part of a system of social change rather than working in isolation as simply the drivers of change. Engineers become more than organisers of stakeholder engagement for their projects but participants in a system that progresses community ownership of social change towards sustainability through CSFs. What can engineers do to convincingly assert that it is engineers as a profession who are ideally positioned to direct the necessary social change to a sustainable system? This presentation will explore this question.