Sustainability

Gerry Te Kapa Coates, IPENZ President 2003 - 2004

One of the privileges of being President of IPENZ was being able to spearhead an initiative of my choosing. With my history as a founder of Engineers for Social Responsibility (www.esr.org.nz) it didn’t surprise anyone, I’m sure when I decided to focus on sustainability during my Presidential year.

It seemed to me that sustainability had fallen off the back of the engineering truck, so to speak. It wasn’t that engineers didn’t care about it - it’s just that it was a difficult nut to crack in their everyday work, and clients weren’t pressing them, so it got overlayed with other things in their “pending” basket. Perhaps they even relabelled it the “too hard” basket.

The Committee left to right - Gerry Coates, Carol Boyle, Ian Shearer, Nadine Wakim,Andrew Macbeth, Kathy Garden, John Gardiner

Our Task Committee of six engineers - laboured away for about nine months and brought to term a beautiful bouncing 80 page report, which we launched at the 2004 IPENZ Annual Convention. It, and other background documents, are now available on this webpage, and will be used as a way of launching other more accessible documents during this succeeding year.

We had Hunter Lovins as a guest speaker, a leading American advocate of sustainable development for over 25 years, and world renowned leader in sustainability and business issues. I have found that there is nothing quite so helpful as having someone important from another country say the same things as you have been saying. As Paul Jowitt of SISTech said at the Sustainability Engineering and Science conference in Auckland July 2004 “Change happens when people who rarely speak, are heard by people who rarely listen”!

This webpage is intended to contribute to, and complement the many other excellent sustainability engineering sites on the worldwide web. May they grow and interlink rapidly, for the benefit of all humanity. Sustainability is everybody’s business - not just engineers.

Sustainability Task Committee
(Listed here as pdf's)
•Task Committee Terms of Reference
•Sustainability - A Task for Engineers: Report from the Presidential Task Committee on Sustainability

Overview Papers produced by the Task Committee
• Sustainability for Engineers – outline of sustainability issues
• Sustainability principles – generic values based principles
• Sustainability & Engineering Practices Overview – generic factors

Sector Papers produced by the Task Committee
• Sustainable Resources and Production in New Zealand
• Sustainable Buildings in New Zealand
• Sustainable Energy in New Zealand
• Sustainable Transportation in New Zealand
• Sustainable Water in New Zealand
• Sustainable Solid Waste Management in New Zealand

Additional material from IPENZ Convention 2004
• Sustainability Task Committee Presentation IPENZ Convention 2004