Climate Change Educational Partnership: Climate Change Engineered Systems, and Society. A Report of Three Workshops.

摘要

The CCEP project focused on defining and characterizing the societal and pedagogical challenges posed by the interactions of climate change, engineered systems and society, and identifying the educational efforts that a network could use to enable engineers, teachers, students, policymakers, and the public to meet the challenges. For instance, improving public infrastructure requires attending to transit, waste, energy, water, and buildings as integrated systems. It also requires addressing the need for changes in engineering education to consider complex systems rather than individual technical problems, and the need for improved communications between public as well as private sector agencies. Societies develop engineered systems to address or mediate climate-related problems, such as drought, sea-level rise or wildfire control; the mediation involves public trust, public engagement, and governance. In these efforts, societies also decide intentionally or implicitly questions of justice and sustainability, such as what areas will receive mediation measures, what types of measures will be used, and what levels and kinds of local impacts are tolerated. The project also aimed to build awareness of these complexities among a diverse set of communities affected by climate change and engineered systems and to engage the communities in addressing these challenges.