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Geoff French, ACE’s immediate past chairman, has recently overseen a merger of his internationally focused firm Scott Wilson with the American engineering giant URS. He was elected to the Executive Committee of FIDIC in 2005, he is a Vice President of the Institution of Civil Engineers and has served as Cjhairman of the ACE. It would have been difficult for FIDIC to find a more experienced vice president, and Geoff is already planning ahead.
“It’s very exciting for me personally but also for the UK to have a prospective FIDIC President again. I think anybody from the UK comes from a culture of industry where consultancy is very strong. The UK’s sector has been working internationally for many years so we have a good appreciation of consultancy worldwide and not just consultancy in Britain.”
Mr French is clear that there is one issue that stands above all others for his industry. He feels the industry knows what it is and why it matters:
“Every time we discuss our industry the conversations come back to sustainability, and that is even higher up the agenda now than ever. If you wanted to sum up the last afternoon in Dehli when we got feedback from the conference delegates, that was the single biggest message. Delegates were disappointed that Copenhagen didn’t produce anything dramatic. And there is a realisation from everyone that we need to be changing the way we do things.
“FIDIC knows the need to do something about sustainability is clear. And that goes wider than FIDIC. The national association and member firms need to take actions to enhance sustainability.”
With FIDIC meeting in Delhi this year, Mr French identified a valuable lesson on display just up the road.
“I think in a way it was an interesting microcosm of the problems that we all face. India was desperately trying to get the work finished for the Commonwealth Games at a time of very rare unseasonal weather patterns. So that illustrated the problem that short term demands, be they the Commonwealth Games or more normal economic demands may run into conflict with the consequences of climate change - as well as the attention we need to give to longer term sustainability issues.
“Delhi’s unseasonal weather was a good reminder of the fact that weather will grow more unpredictable as the climate changes. Indeed, on the other side of the world rainfall has seen landslides in Mexico cut off as many as twenty villages, damaged bridges and killed sixteen people. That shows the power of weather in regards to infrastructure.”
Engineers are all too aware of how the environment and the industry interact. Mr French thinks it is important to hammer that message home.
“In a sense we almost need to keep replaying images of disasters like the landslides. When you need roads in unstable terrain and where there is high rainfall, you have to design accordingly. Likewise, we need to find ways to deal with floods like those seen in Pakistan recently without a huge loss of life.
Not surprisingly he focuses on sustainability as FIDIC’s priority for the year ahead, saying: “We all have a wider responsibility than the narrow responsibility to the client. We have a duty to explain, to educate, and to improve.”
Elaborating on that, and focusing on what needs to be done in practice, he continues:
“The challenge on sustainability is that it is easy to tell people we have to improve and we have to make ourselves more sustainable. It is a more difficult and bigger challenge for everybody to come up with some idea of what that means. How do we measure whether our country or region is more sustainable this year than last? What are the yardsticks and assessment tools we can use for that? We need to agree and set standards. They would be set differently in different parts of the world so as to reflect different situations. But without a standard we can’t ensure things are getting better so we need appropriate standards, perhaps at national levels but with an international overview.”
This will not prove easy. The lack of success at Copenhagen shows that. But FIDIC’s new president-elect doesn’t pretend otherwise:
“There is no single action that we can take that would make everything better. There is no magic wand. One of the challenges we face is that there is a complex set of interconnected issues that we need to move forward on. As FIDIC heard at times in Dehli, ‘the client is no longer the client’. We can’t build structures that are not sustainable. The client might not notice or face any problems as a result, but the population as a whole eventually would. And that is just not good enough.”
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