Special Issue on Sustainability in Civil and Environmental Engineering Education

Abstract

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.