By Cindy Pereira Cooper, Senior Program Officer, The Lemelson Foundation 

Every year on March 4, World Engineering Day provides an opportunity to reflect on the invaluable role engineering excellence plays in tackling global issues in pursuit of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

These 17 goals exist out of a necessity to address global crises that limit humanity’s collective health and potential. Given the scale and scope of societal challenges, we need more engineers equipped to tackle complex problems such as health disparities, climate disasters, and deteriorating infrastructure, to name a few. While engineering has given us longer life spans and other immeasurable benefits, World Engineering Day reminds us there is more to be done.

This year’s World Engineering Day theme, “Shaping Our Sustainable Future Through Engineering,” offers an opportunity to view sustainability as both a destination (the sustainable future) and an approach (shaped through engineering). Regardless of domain and scope, all engineering activities play a role in a sustainable future. From the materials and sourcing mechanisms used, to the energy needed to create, transport, and disperse products and intelligence (artificial and natural alike), to working conditions across the engineering value chain, engineering activities have powerful implications. For a sustainable future, every engineering activity must be attuned to a broader set of performance metrics. This is what excellent engineering can be optimized to do.

As we celebrate and benefit from engineering’s riches — instant communication, massive mobility, medical breakthroughs, and innumerable sources of joy — the excellent engineer also supports us by striving to avoid potential negative outputs, from toxic effluents in the water to biased data sets in computing to noxious particulates in the air. The excellent engineer fosters the livability of our world. The excellent engineer pursues progress that supports life today and for lifetimes to come.

Seeking Excellence Through Educational Re-engineering

Putting engineering activities in harmony with our modern reality requires updating engineering education. Traditionally, engineers were taught to design for technological efficiency, durability, power, and function. But today’s engineers are being called upon to do much more. Ecological and societal impacts belong in design requirements, not as nice-to-have notions but embedded within technological specifications. Engineers who embrace this modern vision are demonstrating the core values of their profession — innovation, efficiency, and problem-solving — while improving lives today and for generations to come.

Graduating engineers must be equipped with sustainability skills and climate fluency in no small part because the job market is making the case. Rapidly growing demand for sustainability knowledge and skills across functions is unfurling a “Green Skills Gap,” as reported in LinkedIn’s 2024 Global Green Skills Report. Hiring statistics show that job seekers with green skills have the upper hand. Between 2023-24, the hiring rate for green talent in the U.S. was 80.3% greater than the hiring rate for talent overall (LinkedIn, 2024).

Higher education institutions are critical to filling the green skills gap, but it can seem overwhelming to evolve a system stymied by decades of limited support for its own innovation. Educators and students are striving for change, but having the will is only the first step. They must also find ways to achieve change.

Catalyzed and supported by The Lemelson Foundation, Engineering for One Planet (EOP) is one of the initiatives making educational shifts easier — providing funding (in the U.S.) and open access teaching resources (globally) that demystify curricular change and enable educators to embed sustainability in any engineering course. The vision of the EOP initiative is that sustainability (including social, environmental, and economic considerations) will be a fundamental principle in the practice of all engineering activities, from design to end of life.

The cornerstone of EOP is the EOP Framework, an open-source menu of dozens of adaptable student learning outcomes across nine (9) social, environmental, and economic sustainability topics, including technical and professional skills. The EOP Framework has been mapped to ABET and AHEP4 accreditation requirements and was co-created with voluntary input from experts across sectors. Since EOP’s launch in 2020:

• More than 50 institutions and hundreds of faculty members have been using EOP’s resources to weave sustainability into engineering courses, mostly core and required, reaching more than 30,000 students to date.
• Villanova University has started offering EOP-based faculty workshops on climate literacy, technical and professional sustainability skills, and curricular change and is translating the EOP Framework into Spanish.
• The Lemelson Foundation has partnered with the American Society for Engineering Education, ABET, and the National Science Foundation to recognize and support faculty curricular innovation efforts.

In the UK, several organizations have launched initiatives and tools to support the integration of responsible and sustainable engineering into postsecondary education:

• With support from the Royal Academy of Engineering and Siemens Digital, the Engineering Professors Council launched a Sustainability Toolkit in 2024. The toolkit features easy-to-use teaching activities, including project briefs and case studies, plus guidance articles and a database of resources.
• In collaboration with the Royal Academy of Engineering, Engineers Without Borders – UK offers several tools, including a Global Responsibility Competency Compass, helping individuals and teams develop their capabilities to respond to a changing world, and the Global Responsibility Reimagined Degree Map, helping engineering departments navigate degree pathways to ensure degrees prepare students for 21st-Century challenges.

Each of these initiatives has evolved through close collaboration with engineering associations, educators, and industry, including input from thousands of individuals collectively. Initiative leaders actively collaborate to reduce duplication of efforts, share resources and ideas, and maximize the value of works created. Educators and users provide continuous feedback and contribute to the body of knowledge. With thoughtfully designed, well-tested teaching tools and committed minds working together, educational re-engineering for a sustainable future is no longer as daunting as it once was.

A Call to Action: Engineering Excellence for a Sustainable Future