Important national and international climate change policies are being considered to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.  The G8 recently stated the goal of achieving at least a 50% reduction in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 – a global challenge.  To achieve such a goal would have profound implications for technologies, infrastructure and the ways energy is used that span the range of engineering disciplines of the Engineering Founder Societies (AIChE, AIME, ASCE, ASME, IEEE). With the belief that it is the responsibility of engineers and engineering professional societies to respond to this grand challenge, the five major engineering societies organized an ad hoc initiative: The Engineering Founder Societies Climate Change Grand Challenge Initiative. This Initiative intends to maintain a sustained effort into the foreseeable future.

As documented in the recent National Academies Summit on America’s Energy Future in March 2008, the argument over climate change has shifted dramatically from debate over aspects of the climate science to what can and needs to be done to manage human impact on climate. The major engineering societies have not been major players in the prior phase of the debate but all have expressed the need to be actively involved in this next phase. Collectively the major societies span nearly all aspects of the engineered environment that define a global response to climate change.

The concept of a joint project with the Founder Societies focused on climate change, lead to the Founder Society Technologies for Carbon Management Project.  This initiative grew out of discussions and meetings during 2008 that considered a wide range of candidate topics.  There are multiple occasions where the engineering societies speak about energy and carbon management (includes addressing carbon based energy sources and non-carbon based energy sources). It became clear that these opportunities typically reflect interests of the specific societies but also need to address the energy challenge from a larger integrated systems perspective.

As perspectives of the various societies were identified, these discussions identified a need for a pilot task project to focus on the challenge of addressing the climate change issue from a larger integrated systems perspective that crosses engineering discipline boundaries.  This pilot project identified 3 tasks:

1. A proposed methodology for evaluating energy systems
2. Recommended metrics
3. Selection of boundaries to provide a uniform basis for decision support.  Such a trans-disciplinary approach has involved work in a virtual environment as well as face-to-face. Working teams were formed and function to deliver their agreed upon outcomes by September 30, 2008; results were presented at a workshop on October 2-3, 2008, in Baltimore, Maryland.

There was also an interest in becoming more effective in integrating technical understanding into policy discussions.  This led to incorporating an objective to facilitate a dialogue across discipline borders; in 2009, efforts will be made to define how to best incorporate the work products of our interdisciplinary groups into the founder societies’ ongoing public policy efforts for delivery to public policy makers and the general public.

Click here to learn more about the Founder Societies Technologies for Carbon Management Project.