Climate change and biodiversity loss are the greatest challenges of our time. For our generations to have any hope of contributing to the fight against these challenges, we must adopt sustainability as the key objective in all of our work moving forward. We believe that global cooperation and inclusivity are key requirements to achieving modern, sustainable solutions. Current practice needs to evolve to encompass all these factors now.
Our team has held meetings to discuss each individual’s background, experience, and what they wish to see for the future. One item that popped up several times was the sharing of knowledge between people, and how status, hierarchy, perceptions, and limited networks impeded the sharing of knowledge on a significant scale.
Our proposal is to create a global, multidisciplinary, collaborative platform, where people can share their sustainable solutions stories. These people could be anyone from industry experts to recent graduates who have identified a more sustainable way of working. We would hope to include anecdotes from people of all backgrounds, identifying precedents that can be used to push forward sustainable design practices that might otherwise not have been known about, to every country in the world. The title of “Champion” could be allocated to contributors, to incentivise knowledge sharing in a world where companies tend to hold onto their secrets in order to maximise their own gains. This “Champion” concept has been adapted from the Institute of Civil Engineers Carbon Champion initiative, and we would hope to work collaboratively with such prestigious institutions such as the ICE, Royal Academy of Engineering, and Engineers Without Borders, in order to lend credibility and legitimacy to the content.
We, as the Engineering community, have a responsibility to affect change, and it is key that we share knowledge as widely as possible to achieve this change.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks very much for your thought-provoking and in-depth comments, it has been good to explore the ideas from many angles and pool our experiences.
We've had two new members join the team, so we are now five ladies working together, which is great!
We had a meeting this afternoon and have some further ideas, and we're wondering if you might be available to join us for our next meeting tomorrow (Saturday) morning from 9am - 10:30am please? (on MS Teams, if that works for you too?)
Apologies that it's over the weekend, but we're all on a short timeline to produce this video by Monday's 12pm GMT deadline!
Many thanks
Lara