Special Issue on Sustainability in Civil and Environmental Engineering Education

Just 10 years ago, very few engineering programs in the United States offered courses in sustainability or even mentioned sustainability in the curriculum. At that time, I was interested in entering academia and wanted to combine my construction and development experience with my environmental engineering education in a more formal way. First, an opportunity arose for me as a lecturer at Yale with the development of a course in air pollution that would be meaningful to a diverse student base, including graduate students in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and chemical engineering majors. This course gave a solid background on the policies and science of air pollution, but also focused on a sustainability issue: the various contributions of motor vehicle use to air pollution problems and alternatives for mitigation or prevention. I was then fortunate to find a position in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of South Carolina. There I was given the opportunity to develop a course in sustainable construction, with lectures on both the concept of low-impact development (LID), a method for development that strives to mimic natural hydrologic cycles, and also green building, through the use of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, which provides a template of issues for civil engineers to become familiar with and incorporate into designs.

By that time, there were still few programs and courses available in the nation on sustainability engineering, although the interest was growing. In fact, the National Science Foundation sponsored a workshop we titled “Construction and the Environment,” focusing on many of the aspects of sustainability and green construction, that attracted a diverse group of educators and professionals from around the country. This workshop and many other nationwide initiatives have prompted groups of interdisciplinary engineers and practitioners to explore ways to incorporate sustainability into the engineering education at many universities and colleges in the United States. The goal of this special issue on Sustainability in Civil and Environmental Engineering Education is to compile many of these initiatives into a single issue so that other educators may incorporate the techniques and lessons learned in their classrooms and so that research into the efficacy of many of the educational practices can be accelerated. The response to this special issue was great—in fact, not all of the submissions could be included in just one issue—so look forward to additional articles that will appear in the next issues of the Journal. Finally, please consider continuing to submit sustainability engineering education case studies and research results for publication.

The special issue starts with a forum titled “Intelligent Sustainable Design: Integration of Carbon Accounting and Building Information Modeling,” by Alexander Stadel, Jonathan Eboli, Alex Ryberg, James Mitchell, and Sabrina Spatari. It focuses on integrating life-cycle assessments and building information modeling through the example of a very difficult and important sustainability issue, carbon accounting. The issue then expands to a series of technical papers, each addressing the incorporation of specific sustainability topics into courses or evaluating sustainability learning techniques.

Two of the papers deal with the energy issues, with one focusing on transportation fuels and the other on the energy sector. The first, “Teaching Life-Cycle Perspectives: Sustainable Transportation Fuels Unit for High-School and Undergraduate Engineering Students,” by Susan E. Powers, Jan E. DeWaters, and Mark Z. Venczel, uses life-cycle approaches for teaching these perspectives. The second, “Energy and Environment Undergraduate Course Emphasizing Comparative Metrics,” by Daniel S. Cohan, proposes the development of a more comprehensive energy sector course curriculum.

Different methods for teaching sustainability are introduced in two of the technical papers. “Use of Outdoor Living Spaces and Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning in Sustainability Engineering Education,” by Defne Apul and Stacy Philpott, uses a special placed-based setting for introducing sustainability concepts, an outdoor classroom garden. Angela Bielefeldt’s contribution, “Incorporating a Sustainability Module into First-Year Courses for Civil and Environmental Engineering Students,” focuses on the use of sustainability modules.

The last two technical papers present the benefits of multidisciplinary courses and interdisciplinary design experiences for enhanced student, faculty, and practitioner learning. They are “Student Learning in a Multidisciplinary Sustainable Engineering Course,” by Alok Bhandari, Say-Kee Ong, and Brian L. Steward, and “Model for Faculty, Student, and Practitioner Development in Sustainability Engineering through an Integrated Design Experience,” by Michael Wolcott, Shane Brown, Melissa King, Deborah Ascher-Barnstone, Todd Beyreuther, and Karl Olsen.

The special issue concludes with a series of three case studies. The first study, “Sustainability Education: Approaches for Incorporating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum,” by Jennifer L. Aurandt and Elizabeth C. Butler, covers several courses either specially developed or partially enhanced for sustainability engineering education. One approach is to redesign existing courses with new sustainability curricular materials, while maintaining the original objectives of the course; and the other approach reviewed is to develop new upper-division electives addressing specific sustainability topics. The case study authored by John T. Kevern, “Green Building and Sustainable Infrastructure: Sustainability Education for Civil Engineers,” provides a framework for development of a sustainability course that transcends the rapid growth of sustainability technologies and the traditional engineering principles that form the basis for design. The final case study, “Intensive Environmental Sustainability Education: Long-Term Impacts on Workplace Behavior” is by Bruce Dvorak, Benjamin A. Stewart, Ahmed A. Hosni, Stacey A. Hawkey, and Valdeen Nelsen. It describes how sustainability coursework in addition to a relevant service internship might have long-term beneficial impacts on sustainability in the future workplace behavior of the students.

Just as Washington State University is now affording me the opportunity to further enhance my teaching and research in sustainability engineering education, I hope that this issue will aid others in advancing the development of this emerging field. As this world becomes more and more populated, it is important that people of all nations have access to the comfortable and sustainable life that we envision. Civil and environmental engineers will have the opportunity to contribute greatly to this vision, and incorporating sustainability into our education, both formal and informal, will aid in this transition in the 21st century.