I am about to hand over the role of Chair of EESG after seven years. The time I’ve spent with EESG has been hugely rewarding and often challenging, and I hope that the progress that we’ve made as a team has served to bring a sustainable future a bit closer. Specifically I hope that the activities that we have initiated have served to enable more IMechE members to play a more effective role in bringing about the changes that are needed to the engineered systems on which society depends, in order to deliver the goal of “sustainability”, the capacity for continuity into the long term future.
I joined the EESG in late 2002, after I enquired of IMechE staff “which is the part of IMechE that looks after sustainability?” I had been working on the challenge of engineering for sustainability since 1998, when I was a product development engineer on the Focus Mk 1 at Ford; I realised that “engineering for sustainability” was a much greater challenge than “engineering new cars”. I started looking for “levers” that I could pull to achieve the shift from unsustainability to sustainability, thinking of Archimedes’ assertion “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth”. I thought IMechE might be such a lever; certainly EESG has always been the second biggest group, meaning that now more than 19,500 members have indicated on their profile that “I have a professional interest in energy, environment and sustainability”.
By 2007 I had accepted the suggestion that I take on the role of Chair, taking over where Professor Ian Arbon left off, although I was not a little daunted at the prospect of following his lead.
At the beginning, most of the energies of the EESG board members were spent on convincing anyone and everyone who we could get to listen that sustainability is actually a thing worth aiming for, that unsustainability is actually a thing worth avoiding. Now the word sustainability has climbed so high up the agenda of engineering, politicians, and industry that it’s thoroughly over-used and abused, so now we have to explain what it is and what it is not; my favourite definition for engineers, which has emerged over the last years, is:
Sustainability is the capacity for continuity into the long term future.
Following, an activity is sustainable if it has the capacity to continue into the long term future – ecologically, socially and financially.
It is the engineering changes entailed in achieving this that we are now mostly engaged with.
In the seven years I’ve been Chair, I have at least learnt a little of how this leviathan institution works. I have discovered that our very existence relies on the Governing Document, our Royal Charter, which defines that the activities of the organisation are to benefit “members and society at large”, which I read as including the “future generations” whose needs are a key part of sustainable development. I have also learnt that because our subject, “Energy Environment and Sustainability”, is now so high up the agenda even if often treated ineptly, in the media, in politics and in industry, this means that EESG does not have the scope to work with conventional events and seminars. The competition for the time and money of participants from commercially aggressive competitors is just too great. Rather, EESG is in the unique position that we can develop new learning, within IMechE as a learned society, which can be both impartial and long term because we represent individual members and our defined beneficiaries are “members and society at large”. In terms of the long and hard endeavour towards a sustainable future, EESG is potentially a very valuable resource, and our contribution, and that of IMechE, could be critical. I am even more convinced as I hand over to my very capable successor that EESG can be a major force for change for good.
In the last seven years the Board and I have set about making many changes, of which some have worked, some have not. Some challenges remain and my successor, Rupert Blackstone, will certainly have a lot to think about as he works out how best to use his tenure.
What has gone well? What have we achieved.
- Change to funding mechanism
In the last two years EESG has been working with the Technical Strategy Board and Trustee Board to create and introduce a better way of directing member subscription money towards member-led activities. This reached fruition at the beginning of 2014; now there is a small annual budget directly targeted at member-led activities, taken from the income from member subs. The first thing we have done with this fund it to run the Expert Meeting on “Engineering in a Changed World” in July 2014.
The fund is now in place for all member-led Divisions and Groups, and I understand many initiatives have been funded like this.
- We have retained the Chartered Environmentalist qualification.
A recent challenge has been to retain the ability of IMechE to award the CEnv qualification. The registration authority for CEnv, the Society for the Environment, required that IMechE renewed our licence, first awarded in 2008, and comply with updated systems. This we have now done, and I’m happy to invite IMechE members who may be eligible to put themselves forward for this very respectable qualification.
Please contact IMechE for more information on how to register through the IMechE atcenv@imeche.org.
EESG has piloted a scheme that’s designed to enable a greater “reach” when we run an event; as well as catering for the people who come to a seminar, we work with universities to organise “dissemination events” so that students come to our event and share their learning with their peers. We can increase the reach of a seminar by several hundred percent, and we are aiming to make this a standard part of IMechE events.
- Three-stage learning process
Because our field, engineering for sustainability, is still evolving very fast, it’s important that IMechE, as a learned society, works to generate new learning as well as to disseminate existing learning. To this end we developed and implemented a three stage process: first we invite experts to meet together to discuss a chosen subject, and to decide what it is that we need to know that we don’t know. Then we spend some time finding answers, new answers, to those questions. Then we host a conventional event, such as a seminar, and/or issue a report to share that new learning. This process needs more effort than a simple seminar, but the principle has been accepted by other divisions and groups.
What was challenging?
- Sharing learning across D&G; there is a well-established matrix structure in the Technical Strategy Board; industry specific Divisions are crossed with subject specific groups. However, it isn’t so easy to share learning about engineering for sustainability when points of contact are few. It’s an on-going challenge to share the great learning we have in EESG with our peers across the institution, so that their activities can be enriched by our learning and vice versa.
- Finding ways to include more IMechE volunteer members in the work of EESG, without the need for more people to sit in Board meetings. We have tried to establish a series of “working groups”, so that people can work on activities related to sustainability and engineering, without being on the Board. This idea has been difficult to get people to engage in.
However, if you’re reading this and you’d like to put your shoulder to the wheel, and you have a great idea that you’d like to implement via IMechE, then maybe we can make it work together.
Role of IMechE as agent for change
I believe that IMechE can continue to act as an agent for change as professional engineers continue to seek engineering solutions to the rapidly growing number of un-sustainability challenges facing society. I believe that because IMechE members are individual engineers, rather than organisations, the institution, and especially the Energy Environment and Sustainability group, can continue to work without the short-term vision that constrains the thinking of any organisation with either a commercial profit timescale or a political election timescale. I believe that individual professional members can continue to work as “providers of solutions”, rather than simply as “advocates of technology”.
I would like to wish all the good luck, and every happy circumstance, for my successor Rupert Blackstone, and I ask that every IMechE member and every member of staff give their full support to Rupert as he takes up the role of Chair of EESG.