Climate Change, Stationarity, and Sustainability: How Are They Connected?

This chapter explores the relationships between the Earth’s natural capital, climate change, sustainability, and human society. The assumption of stationarity is one of the key foundations of civil engineering. It enables engineers to design and deliver robust, resilient, reliable, and long-lived civil works projects using historical climate conditions to estimate future climate conditions. Climate regulation is just one of the Earth’s natural ecosystem resources and services from which society benefits. Since 1990, the United Nations Development Program has published the Human Development Index (HDI), a rough measure of the economic development and well-being of the world’s nations. The HDI is a combination of three factors: life expectancy, knowledge and education, and income. The ecological footprint is the natural resources and service productivity demanded by society across these productivity categories: built-up land, cropland, fishing grounds, forest products, grazing land, and carbon absorption (forests).