In the twentieth century, civil engineers reached striking advances in the various branches of their discipline and put down cities, roads, bridges, buildings and a great variety of infrastructure. What was overlooked along the way — and what, in spite of the progress and expansion of countless construction projects on the surface of the earth, has each day been driven further and further toward ruin — was nature and the environment: forests, pastures, rivers, lakes, wildlife, food sources, ground water and all that mankind knows by the name of nature were destroyed, and at times annihilated, in the course of programmes of development and construction.
Parallel to humanity's advance in construction and public-works engineering, the other sciences too progressed swiftly and conspicuously. Among them, certain fields — biotechnology, nanotechnology, electronic commerce, advanced communication and information technology — can enter into a direct relation with civil engineering and either moderate or altogether dismantle its destructive aspects toward nature.
On this occasion, leading civil-engineering centres in the world, at the threshold of the third millennium, held conferences to examine the difficulties facing civil engineers and to set out new programmes for them in the new millennium. What follows is a précis of the addresses given at the Civil Engineering Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, delivered by Prof. David Newland, head of the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge, and Prof. G. Wayne Clough, President of the Georgia Institute of Technology, on 20-21 March 2002.
One point in this connection seems worth flagging: in the addresses, civil engineering was always referred to as “civil and environmental engineering,” which signals the responsibilities of the discipline in the third millennium.
In 1900, even at MIT the structure of matter was still among the unknowns. J. J. Thomson had only just discovered the electron. In 1952 atomic energy was put to use, and in 2000 a single electronic chip housed millions of transistors per square centimetre.
In 1900, Darwin's theory of evolution was still being debated; in 1953, Crick and Watson uncovered the structure of DNA; and by 2000, a map of 100,000 human genes was being prepared.
In 1900 only eight planets in the solar system were known. In 1957 the Russians' artificial satellite Sputnik went up; and by 2003 the International Space Station — covering the area of a football pitch — will have been completed.
According to the United Nations' figures, the world's population reached six billion on 12 October 1999. From the dawn of the human species until the early 1800s the world's population reached one billion, and it took roughly a century for the world to reach two billion. The most recent billion, however, was added in only twelve years. The unanswered question is how to settle the four billion people who will be added to the world's population over the next fifty years.
Most of this growth will be in the developing countries, where sanitation, clean water and electricity are not adequately provided. To bring these places to Western standards will require enormous sources of electrical energy. The official forecasts of the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) put the energy needed twenty years from now at 50 per cent above the present level. Within that figure, India's required energy will be three times its present level and China's twice its present level.
As required energy rises, carbon production will rise too, because in this period the use of fossil fuels will still be common. New non-fossil energy sources will grow by up to 60 per cent — more than half of which is hydroelectric — but this energy will only meet about 7 per cent of total human energy needs; and unless new and suitable technologies are brought to bear, the release of carbon gas to the atmosphere will go on rising.
We should therefore not expect that, by some combination of raising equipment efficiency, environmental precautions and replacing a small portion of energy sources, we can undo the catastrophic climate changes brought about by the production of greenhouse gases — and especially carbon dioxide. In all likelihood the years to come will see us facing the largest technological problem on this earth. Eradicating poverty, producing food, preventing the spread of disease, building housing, producing teaching aids — all of these need energy, while it is not possible to produce energy without polluting the atmosphere we breathe and warming the planet on which we live.
Nuclear power may be a solution, although it too has many side dangers that must be reckoned with. This rising trend, combined with humanity's tendency to defer infrastructural and environmental needs until potential crises break, means that the profession of civil engineering has gained ever greater importance and necessity.
Speaking about the future is always a hazardous business. We experience the future every second, yet we are still not able to see it clearly and exactly. At the dawn of the first computers, T. J. Watson, the chief executive of IBM, said: “There is probably a need for six computers in the world for governments.” In 1977, Mr Ken Olsen, chief executive of Digital Equipment, said: “There is no convincing reason for individuals to have personal computers in their homes.” And recently a remark of Mr Bill Gates, chief executive of Microsoft, in 1981 has been quoted: “640 kilobytes of memory is probably enough for anyone”! These men were among the leaders and experts in their specialised fields. Even so, they assessed the future wrongly. So it is likely that man will not be able to foretell the future as he ought.
Yet certain matters of the future can be discussed and contested with clarity. The fundamental challenges facing society — those that make it imperative to mobilise the talents in the field of civil engineering, questions such as food, housing, and all those mentioned earlier — call for the renewal of new technology and a new manner in civil engineering. Likewise, the appearance of the disputed and attractive fields of biotechnology, of nanotechnology in materials, of electronic commerce, of advanced communications and of information technology is enough to make us consider some of the building inventions which the seasoned specialist in this field, Randall Wsick, has predicted for the twenty-first century: “… these tiny living beings, made and finished by human hands, will be useful in producing strong and sound building materials, and will erase from the world stage the process of biotechnological draining and the plumbing for waste disposal. Optical fibres, lasers and photonics will replace metal wires, and computers will play the major and dominant role in the whole of buildings. Wall partitions, made of new building materials, will take on the absorption and transmission of light and heat …”
The driving forces behind these advances — which in truth are gifts of other technological fields to the discipline of civil engineering — must be made available to civil engineers, so that they can keep pace with this technology, whose speed each day is greater, and consign present-day worries about the world to oblivion. Graduates in civil and environmental engineering carry, in this respect, the special responsibility of holding a global outlook, and they must take it into account in every aspect of their work.
The available water sources in China, India and the United States, which together supply half the world's food, have begun a downward trend, and a growing number of rivers run dry before reaching the sea. By 2025 the dwelling area of approximately three billion people in the world will be without sources of fresh water.
India today contains more than one billion people, comprising one-sixth of the world's population. In the past fifty years grain production in this country has tripled. While this is a pleasing development on the agricultural stage, the farmers have for this purpose dug some 28 million new wells. As a result, India is now losing its underground water reserves at an even greater speed. By the assessment of the International Water Management Institute, the falling trend of water sources in India may reduce the grain harvest to a quarter of its current level.
In the United States, although population growth is not all that high, the states of Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado have lost a great deal of arable land in the past two decades because of decreasing water sources. The Colorado River, which carries little water before discharging into the Gulf of California, has lost the fishery section that once flourished at the mouth of the Gulf. In the south-east of the United States several states are in dispute over the use of the waters of the Chattahoochee River.
In New York City alone there are about 6,200 miles of underground water pipes a hundred years old, of which around 600 burst each year, leading to water cuts and flooding. The same is true of the 160,000 miles of oil pipelines, some of which are now 90 years old.
Population growth carries an increase in waste in its train. In the borough of Manhattan in New York alone, 28,000 tons of refuse is produced each day — 10 million tons a year.
Today, because of motor vehicle use, the level of airborne pollutants has risen sharply, and the dangers it brings — whether from the inhalation of polluted air or from solar radiation passing through a depleted ozone layer — are growing rapidly. In 1999, 1.5 billion passengers travelled by air, and by 2015 this figure will reach about 2 billion. By that point at least one aviation accident a week will occur. The need for more flights, and consequently more airports, brings with it more environmental pollution.
Air pollution leads to atmospheric change, atmospheric change to natural disasters, and natural disasters to losses and damage; and this destructive cycle will continue. In the United States, more than a quarter of the population now lives within five miles of a coast, and over the past five years (1995-1999) the most severe storms in recorded history have taken place. Although experts shrink from attributing the rising frequency of storms to global warming, there is no doubt that the issue affects their intensity.
To resolve the problems of the coming century we need new strategies. Traffic loads cannot be lightened by adding lanes to motorways. Infrastructure tissue cannot be repaired with the same old materials, frameworks and outdated patterns dressed up in management-plan clothes. Polluted urban land cannot be reclaimed by burning millions of cubic metres of soil. Solutions must be sought in the framework of new technologies. While civil engineers offer fresh strategies, the necessary driving technology must also be brought from other branches of knowledge into the civil-engineering branch.
