BE Magazine Volume 5, Issue 2 - (Page 15) including its environment and its resources. One element of sustaining the environment is increasing sustainability and then maintaining sufficient bio-capacity to continue renewal while accommodating current and future activities by humans. By remediating the impact of human activity, the bio-capacity of the Earth can be increased by recovering bio-capacity is the obvious initiative in regard to nonrenewable resources and consuming them more efficiently. In addition to consumption, there are opportunities to more efficiently produce by-products from raw materials, including processes that consume less energy and produce less waste, processes that produce a higher yield for the same raw material, By remediating the impact of human activity, the bio-capacity of the Earth can be increased by recovering bio-capacity lost to prior human activity. lost to prior human activity. This includes solutions such as hazardous waste recovery and disposal; treatment of polluted water; cleaning polluted air (with urban forests, for example); recovering green spaces lost to activities such as mining and landfills; and mining landfills for resource recovery. Reducing or eliminating detrimental environmental impact refers to the well-known and longstanding initiatives to reduce the overall environmental impact of new infrastructure projects. It also includes initiatives to reduce pollutant emissions from commercial facilities. This includes designing new facilities that produce less pollutant waste, retrofitting existing facilities to capture or process pollutants, and repurposing waste products for use in other processes. Extending life and reusing infrastructure assets is another mechanism for reducing the ecological footprint to eliminate the footprint from material production and transportation, construction, and debris and waste removal associated with new construction by extending the useful life of infrastructure assets as well as adapting them for new uses. Given the current global dependence on many nonrenewable resources, consumption of nonrenewable resources continues for the foreseeable future. More efficiently extracting, processing, and consuming these resources will extend the window for replacing them with renewable sources. More efficient consumption more efficient means of transport, and reuse of by-products. Given the ultimate limits on nonrenewable resources, expanding the global resource supplies is also an approach to extending the availability of nonrenewable resources, and ensuring their continuing availability even as they are being replaced for some uses by renewable sources. These approaches could include more complete and efficient extraction methods, more effective and accurate exploration, and more ecofriendly exploration and extraction. them with the appropriate education in the infrastructure professions to enable them to contribute to global sustainability. The most fundamental requirement in the long term is to attract young students to the sciences and ultimately the technical fields, such as engineering, relevant to infrastructure. Approaches to this include supporting elementary and middle-school programs to promote interest in science and math. Programs supported by Bentley that are dedicated to attracting students to the sciences and engineering include Future City, Future Cities India 2020, and the ACE Mentor Program. Once students have chosen to pursue a technical career, it is also necessary to attract them to the infrastructure professions. Initiatives to do this include supporting university programs and competitions focusing on infrastructure (the Solar Decathlon, for example), as well as supporting universitylevel volunteer programs working on projects in the developing world, including Engineers Without Borders, HOPE Worldwide, and others. In addition, implementing active internship and co-op programs within infrastructure-related companies will support this objective. There is significant anecdotal evidence that university-level research is not leveraged to the degree possible. There are many factors contributing to this. Unlike the aerospace, Meeting the challenges to sustain both society and the environment requires a global pool of infrastructure professionals armed with effective knowledge and tools. Sustaining the professions Meeting the challenges to sustain both society and the environment requires a global pool of infrastructure professionals armed with effective knowledge and tools. Our pool of infrastructure professionals is increasingly inadequate. Initiatives intended to overcome these shortages include attracting and educating, renewing, and enabling. Critical to expanding the pool of infrastructure professionals is both attracting students to the infrastructure professions and providing automotive, and defense industries, the infrastructure community is very diverse, highly fragmented, and often operates locally. Corporate involvement is largely through modest monetary grants. What is required is the active engagement in and support of research by the members of the infrastructure professions. This will enable practitioners to realize the research results more directly, as well as help focus the research initiatives on issues that are immediately relevant to the infrastructure industry. Volume 5, Issue 2 | BE MAGAZINE 15 http://www.futurecity.org http://www.futurecitiesindia2020.co.in/ http://www.acementor.org/ http://www.ewb-usa.org/ http://www.hopeww.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?&pid=191&srcid=-2
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.