Engineers working in the built environment ‘have an urgent responsibility to help reduce energy consumption, and provide for adaptation of buildings and cities to respond to the challenges of climate change, while accommodating the needs of rapidly growing populations’.
So said incoming CIBSE President, George Adams, in his Presidential address, ‘Whole Life Thinking’, at an inauguration of the Institution’s President, President-Elect, and Vice- Presidents, and recent AGM, at London’s Royal Society. The theme built on Retiring President, Professor David Fisk’s call last year for the industry to “concentrate on measuring and learning from the performance of real buildings, not on ‘greenwash’.”
George Adams stressed the need for ‘a new energy engineering conscience’, called for the pace of action to reduce the sector’s environmental impact to be accelerated, ‘through increased efforts to embrace diversity and behavioural change’, and said encouraging young people to consider engineering as a career was ‘essential’.
While recognising that ‘our growing cities’ were the ‘biggest single challenge’ in addressing the impact, in a changing world, of social and climate change, he also underlined ‘the huge challenge of the energy and environmental impacts of existing building stock’. “Aligned to this,” he said, “our societies continue to rapidly grow, consuming more and more technology and energy.”
The new CIBSE President (pictured, left, receiving his CIBSE President medal from Immediate Past President, David Fisk), also acknowledged the need to work on new innovations and embrace technology such as building information modelling BIM. (CIBSE and partners have launched BIMTalk – www.bimtalk.co.uk – a website designed to share knowledge on the topic across all areas of the industry).
