Survival is the driver for adaptation: safety engineering changed the future, security engineering prevented disasters and transition engineering navigates the pathway to the climate-safe future
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Susan Krumdieck
Abstract
Consider a simple idea describing the time, space and relationship scales of survival. Engineering has been going along with the current paradigm that growth in wealth and material consumption can continue through innovation and technology development. The proposed survival continuum concept represents a new way to think about sustainability that has clear implications for influencing engineering projects in all fields. The argument for survival as the driver for adaptation is developed sequentially, building on theory, definition, examples and history. The key idea is that sustainability will be effectively addressed by a new engineering discipline furthering development of the field of safety engineering with longer time scale, broader space scale and more complex relationship scale. The implication is that the past 100-year development of safety engineering can be leveraged to fast-track the inclusion of sustainability risk management throughout the entire engineering profession. The conclusion is that a new, interdisciplinary field, Transition Engineering, is emerging as the way our society will achieve sustainability-safety through rapid reduction in fossil fuel use and reduction in detrimental social and environmental impacts of industrialization.
Acknowledgments
More than 20 postgraduate students and the many colleagues who over the past 20 years have participated in sustainability transition research with so much passion and commitment.
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Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.
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- Personalized and targeted therapies
- Identification of potential histone deacetylase inhibitory biflavonoids from Garcinia kola (Guttiferae) using in silico protein-ligand interaction
- Chemical computational approaches for optimization of effective surfactants in enhanced oil recovery
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- Trends in microbial degradation and bioremediation of emerging contaminants
- Power to the city: Assessing the rooftop solar photovoltaic potential in multiple cities of Ecuador
- Phytoremediation as an effective tool to handle emerging contaminants
- Recent advances and prospects for industrial waste management and product recovery for environmental appliances: a review
- Integrating multi-objective superstructure optimization and multi-criteria assessment: a novel methodology for sustainable process design
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- Anaerobic digestion fundamentals, challenges, and technological advances
- Survival is the driver for adaptation: safety engineering changed the future, security engineering prevented disasters and transition engineering navigates the pathway to the climate-safe future
