The importance of properly identifying, assessing, and managing risk in all areas of engineering practice, the fact that genuine innovation is almost impossible without a certain element of risktaking, and the need to acknowledge and respond to public concerns, however much some may be ill-founded, over the risks inherent in technological and engineering advances, are highlighted in a new risk guidance document, Guidance on Risk for the Engineering Profession,
published by the Engineering Council in London last month. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.
The Engineering Council’s launch of the new risk guidance document, Guidance on Risk for the Engineering Profession, which replaces the Code of Professional Practice on Engineers and Risk Issues published nearly 20 years ago, took place at an especially apposite time given the recent occurrences at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, and the accompanying extensive debate about whether the “risks” inherent in this form of energy generation outweigh its cited advantages. The concise new guidance document, which was officially published on 31 March along with an accompanying wallet-sized card listing the six key risk principles outlined within it, takes a similar form to sustainability guidance produced for engineers by the Engineering Council in May 2009. The Council says this earlier guidance has been very well-received, and is now regularly referred to “by academics and practitioners alike”. In fact the new card on risk carries the six principles on sustainability on its reverse. Back to the new guidance, however, and the six new principles on risk have been published, speakers explained at the guidance’s launch at the Roberts Building at University College London, “to help engineers and technicians meet their professional obligations, and to ensure that the identification and management of risk is an important consideration in their everyday engineering activity”. University College London was felt to be a particularly appropriate venue for the launch event given its strong reputation for engineering teaching, and indeed one of the speakers was Professor Anthony Finkelstein BEng, MSc, PhD, CEng, FIET FBCS, Dean of UCL’s Engineering Sciences Faculty. He told an audience that included CEOs, chairs, and other senior representatives of many of the UK’s leading engineering institutes, as well as top academics, that addressing the major global challenges of sustainability, climate change, and security, entailed inherent risk for engineers working in many areas of the profession, and that it was their “ethical responsibility” to recognise this, and to deploy their judgment, expertise, experience, and skills accordingly, to minimise this risk wherever, and whenever, possible.
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