Recently, Roger Batten, one of our exec team members was in print - his letter appeared in the New Civil Engineer magazine, which is the official magazine of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). For over 50 years, NCE has been the leading resource for civil engineering news and analysis, industry comment, technical features, product innovations and job opportunities.
Roger and I got to talking about this after one of our committee meetings, and we thought that it would be of interest to members of our online community. Roger agreed to slightly expand on his letter and I would upload as a blog posting on our community area - fascinating topic and I hope may start some interesting discussion. Please do feel free to post your thoughts in the comment box below - look forward to reading them.
As well as all the discussions being held on Infrastructure renewal and resilience which, in the UK, include Heathrow, High Speed 2 and Hinkley there is also the pressing matter of global warming. However, the real elephant in the room is population growth. For thousands of years population grew only slowly but in recent years it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000 the increase in world population was three times greater than in the entire previous history of humanity, an increase from 1.5 billion to 6.1 billion in just 100 years. The UN calculates that there are now more than 7 billion living humans on Earth, 6.5% of all people ever born, yet less than 200 years ago we numbered a mere 1 billion. Admittedly, the world population growth peaked in 1962, at around 2.1%, and has come down to around half since then, but we are still likely to number over 11 billion by 2100. The real challenge is not only in infrastructure renewal and resilience but in providing all the new infrastructure to support this increase in population as well as solving the problem of global warming - quite a legacy to leave to the next generation.
Uploaded on behalf of
Roger M Batten
Committee Member
IET/ACostE Project Controls Technical and Professional Network