Today as part of the Global Climate Strike, rather than striking, our teams across our studios will be spending time discussing and exploring how we can best engineer to fight climate change.

Our vision at Civic Engineers is, through our engineering to have a positive impact on the environment and enable people to lead happier and healthier lives. Ensuring our cities and towns are climate resilient and fighting the climate change issues we face is at the heart of that.

We believe we are in a privileged position where we can make a really positive impact through our work and try to ensure all our design decisions from a structural and urban infrastructure point of view consider climate impact. A few weeks ago, we signed up to ‘Engineers Declare’, the declarations supported by the Institution of Civil Engineers and Institution of Structural Engineers. These declarations highlight the challenges facing the construction industry and set out action points to help achieve the goal of the UK becoming a net zero economy by 2050.  

There’s no doubt as designers we have a responsibility to think differently and we need to be braver, bolder and quicker in addressing climate change issues. Projects we are already working on such as the Glasgow’s transformative Avenues project and Citu’s Climate Innovation District (winner of the Sunday Times British Homes Award ‘Sustainable Development of the Year’ earlier this week) show what can be done.  We believe we must ensure our towns and cities are designed in such a way that our buildings and our urban infrastructure are resilient, have a positive impact on the environment and at the same time are attractive so that people want to live, work and visit them. So our focus for today, Global Climate Strike day will be on how, as engineers and collaborators we can achieve this.