Integration of Climate Change in the Analysis and Design of Engineered Systems: Barriers and Opportunities for Engineering Education

The goal of this paper is to begin mapping perspectives of engineering faculty on barriers and opportunities related to the integration of climate change in the analysis and design of engineered systems (CC&ES). Although both sustainability and renewable energy have been receiving increasing attention in engineering education for quite some time ¹ , climate change, especially as it relates to engineered systems, has yet to become a widely accepted topic of teaching and research. From recent literature on engineering education and from interviews with engineering faculty, a picture emerges of whether and how climate change is an important dimension in the analysis and design of engineered systems. From those sources, we begin to see what it might take to incorporate the relationship between climate change and engineered systems in engineering education, what the barriers and opportunities to this incorporation might be, and what strategies might be available to institutionalize this incorporation in engineering education.

Support for this paper comes from a larger research project on "Climate Change, Engineered Systems, and Society" which has the goal to develop conceptual and educational frameworks and networks of change agents to promote effective formal and informal education for engineering students, policymakers and the public at large. The project partners include the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Arizona State University, Boston Museum of Science, Colorado School of Mines (CSM), and the University of Virginia. Within this larger team, the CSM team is planning to develop a testbed for the incorporation of CC&ES in engineering education. Hence, our first step is to find related curricular innovations in the engineering education literature and perspectives from engineering faculty on barriers and opportunities to the integration of CC&ES in engineering education.