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Global Solutions for a Sustainable Future: The Role of Engineers in Climate Resilience - Thought Leadership by #SustXGlobal50 Awardee Jeanette Southwood, Canada
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Summary
As climate change intensifies, the world faces unprecedented challenges that transcend national borders. In this thought leadership article, "Global Challenges Demand Global Solutions: The Importance of International Collaboration in Advancing Sustainability" by Jeanette Southwood, Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Strategic Partnerships at Engineers Canada, and a recipient of The SustainabilityX® Magazine Global 50 Women In Sustainability Awards™ 2024 explores how international collaboration is key to developing sustainable infrastructure and climate-resilient communities. She highlights the importance of engineering knowledge exchange, initiatives like the PIEVC Protocol, and global STEM programs like Future City to empower the next generation. Additionally, she emphasizes the critical role of gender equity in engineering and how diverse perspectives enhance sustainability solutions. By working together across disciplines and countries, we can build a more resilient and equitable future.
You may have seen the images this past summer of the largest wildfire in a century to impact the picturesque the town of Jasper in Jasper National Park, Alberta. An estimated 358 of the 1,138 structures in the town were destroyed in less than 48 hours after the fire began. Residents were lucky to escape safely. But for many, they saw their homes and most cherished possessions go up in flames. One brave firefighter lost his life.
The effects of a changing climate don’t stop at national borders. In 2024 alone, we saw lethal heat in India, Mexico, Greece, and in Saudi Arabia during Hajj. Chile saw torrential rains and wildfires. And in the midst of writing this article in October 2024, I heard the news of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Milton in Florida, just two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore a path of destruction through many of the same areas in the south-eastern United States.
This is the reality we are all reckoning with, the whole world over. No one is immune.
Climate change is contributing to ever more frequent natural disasters that are reshaping our communities, and how we think about our critical infrastructure.
Often the buildings all around us are an afterthought—not seen or thought about in any meaningful way—until disaster hits. They either hold up and keep us safe, or they don’t. But that’s becoming an increasingly untenable way to live.
The time to act is now.
I’m an engineer. Engineers have a significant and key role to play in addressing climate change issues and incorporating them into resilient infrastructure. But we can’t do it alone. We must work in concert with other professionals, such as architects and city planners, and with our colleagues from many backgrounds around the globe. After all, global challenges such as climate change demand global solutions.
Transcending National Boundaries with Engineering Knowledge Exchange
Earlier in my career, I worked in consulting engineering, leading a team focused on sustainable cities around the world. This instilled in me a strong belief that we cannot look only within our own country for research and for solutions. Some countries have been facing challenges for a long time that we in Canada have only recently begun to face, and they have worked to develop solutions – for example, worked to understand the impacts of climate change on land use, conflicts between using land for agriculture versus developing land for housing, food security and economic insecurity, and social unrest.
I still have the opportunity to witness the benefits of global cooperation in my current role. I am now the Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Strategic Partnerships at Engineers Canada, the national association of Canada’s 12 provincial and territorial engineering regulators that license the more than 300,000 members of the engineering profession in Canada. Recognizing the important role that engineers play in addressing climate change issues and incorporating them into their practice, Engineers Canada has been engaged in this issue for over 20 years, with a focus on infrastructure climate vulnerability and risk assessment, as well as proposing adaptation policies, strategies, and professional practices to improve resilience.
Between 2005 and 2012, Engineers Canada, with funding from Natural Resources Canada and in collaboration with partners from all levels of government and other sectors, formed the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee (PIEVC). The committee developed the PIEVC Protocol, a tool for engineers to use in conducting climate vulnerability assessments on infrastructure systems located in a range of settings, from small communities to large urban centres.
Since its inception, the PIEVC Protocol has been used in dozens of infrastructure assessments in municipalities throughout Canada, in Canada’s North, in First Nations communities, and abroad. The PIEVC Protocol has been applied in countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Vietnam, and the Nile River Basin, demonstrating the value of sharing engineering research, tools, and learnings from one country with others.
In March 2020, Engineers Canada transferred ownership of the PIEVC Protocol to a partnership between the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, the Climate Risk Institute—both Canadian organizations—and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, the German international development agency. The PIEVC program had seen such success and was growing at a pace that Engineers Canada felt the partnership of the three organizations was best positioned to help it expand to its full potential in Canada, and internationally.
It is examples like these, both in consulting engineering and now at Engineers Canada, that demonstrate that leadership in climate solutions must transcend national boundaries. Canada cannot, nor any other country, walk this path alone.
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Empowering the Next Generation
We know that the challenges presented by climate change will not be solved tomorrow. And despite the devastation that we have seen in recent natural disasters around the world, we know that natural disasters will only get worse and more frequent in the future due to the changing climate. It is the next generation that will feel even greater effects from climate change.
While engineers the world over are currently working hard to advance climate solutions, we must also look forward to the next generation, and support and empower them to carry this work forward into the future.
One of Engineers Canada’s roles is to foster recognition of the value and contribution of engineers to society, and to spark an interest in engineering in the next generation. In so doing, we again learned from the work of our colleagues around the world.
Future City is an international STEM competition for students in grades 6, 7, and 8. It challenges them, each year, to use the engineering design process to design a city 100 years into the future that presents solutions to a sustainability challenge. Future City was developed by DiscoverE, an American non-profit dedicated to providing global resources, programs, and connections between K-12 students and engineers.
Engineers Canada worked with DiscoverE to bring the Future City program to Canadian students in 2017, and with the help of partners such as Engineers of Tomorrow, has since adapted the competition into the Future City Experience. The Future City Competition and the Future City Experience are great ways to expose youth to engineering concepts, to connect them with engineering mentors, and to challenge youth to develop solutions to challenges that impact us all.
Gender Equity and Sustainability
One of the benefits of Future City is that it also reaches girls and other underrepresented groups at a rate that exceeds other programs. As a Black woman in engineering, and as an immigrant to Canada, I have experienced first-hand the barriers that women and minorities face in forging a career in engineering. It’s important that we demonstrate to young girls and others that they can be engineers, and that we need them to be engineers.
Climate change has gendered impacts. It also has outsized effects on vulnerable populations. We need greater representation in engineering, and more diverse views so that the solutions that engineers develop are more inclusive.
Engineers Canada is committed to making the engineering profession more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible. I am proud to share this work and what we have learned with others around the world. I participate in the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) Women in Engineering Committee, where I’m always happy to learn from other engineering organizations around the globe, and how they’re advancing gender equity in engineering in their countries.
After all, gender equity is an important pillar of sustainability, and we again have much to share with and learn from our colleagues around the world.
Realizing a Better Future through Global Collaboration
Much like the students who participate in the Future City Competition do, take a moment to imagine a city 100 years into the future that has realized sustainable solutions. What does that look like?
Imagine a future when a spring flood doesn’t back up sewers, keep cars and public transit off the roads for days at a time, and create unsafe drinking water for a remote Indigenous community.
Imagine a future where an autumn derecho doesn’t knock out power lines for days on end, causes businesses to shut down and workers to miss shifts and lose the wages they count on to feed their families.
Imagine a summer heat wave that doesn’t overrun emergency rooms with seniors and infants suffering heat stroke because their apartments can’t keep them cool.
We may fear climate change, but it has arrived and we are already feeling its severe impacts around the world. Now is the time to take action to climate-proof our communities.
With global collaboration, we have every ability to be resilient, to understand the climate realities of the 21st Century and to build infrastructure for the world we live in right now, not the world we wish still existed.
Engineers Canada, Canadian engineers, and engineers around the world are dedicated to doing our part to make this vision a reality. Through our work—both past and present—to help engineers conduct climate vulnerability assessments, to spark an interest in the next generation of engineers and challenge them to think of those sustainable solutions, and to bring greater equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility to engineering, we are learning from and collaborating both in Canada and globally.
Because it is by working together that we will bring about change for a better tomorrow.
About The SustainabilityX® Magazine
The SustainabilityX® Magazine is an award-winning, digital, female-founded, and female-led non-profit initiative bringing the environment and economy together for a sustainable future through dialogue, and now transforming the environment and economy for a sustainable future through the power of women's leadership. Founded on May 8, 2016, and inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by Canada's Top 30 Under 30 in Sustainability Leadership awardee, Supriya Verma, the digital media initiative focuses on approaching the world's most pressing challenges with a holistic, integrated, systems-based perspective as opposed to the traditional and ineffective siloed approach with a single lens on interdisciplinary topics like climate and energy. This initiative ultimately seeks to explore how to effectively bring the environment and economy together through intellectual, insightful dialogue and thought-provoking discussion amongst individuals across sectors taking an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to untangling the intricate web of sustainability while championing women's leadership in sustainability.
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