Sustaining infrastructure

By A. B. Cleveland, Jr., Bentley Systems

The mission of Bentley Systems has long focused on helping our users improve the world’s infrastructure. Infrastructure provides the basic facilities, services, and installations required for a community or society to function and is, in fact, the interface between people and our planet. For society to advance much beyond a very basic agrarian lifestyle requires infrastructure – which, in this view, includes not only public works like roads, bridges, water and sewer, but also private utilities, communications networks, facilities for manufacturing, housing, education, and healthcare, and much more. Nearly all of our day-to-day interaction with the environment is mediated in some way by services provided by infrastructure.

Sustainability
By “sustaining infrastructure,” Bentley means the role of infrastructure in creating a sustainable world; how our users are meeting these challenges today; and how they can better address the challenges in the future. In terms of sustaining the planet, there are many critical issues surrounding the world’s infrastructure, including CO2 emissions, climate change, the availability of clean water and sanitation, chronic hunger, unsafe bridges, earthquakes, severe weather, terrorist attacks, civil wars, coastal flooding, hazardous waste, and depletion of nonrenewable resources. The world’s infrastructure – as well as the professionals around the world who design, build and operate the world’s infrastructure assets – will play a fundamentally important role in successfully addressing them.

Given the scope of infrastructure and the central importance of infrastructure to society at large, infrastructure is necessarily a central factor in achieving our sustainability objectives. Our collective quality of life, the sustainability of human society, and the sustainability of the planet are directly dependent upon the services provided by infrastructure.

Perhaps the first definition of sustainability, as we now consider it, was given by the report from the Bruntland Commission in 1987. In this report, sustainable development is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Thus, in a sustainable world we do not continue the accelerating depletion of nonrenewable resources, nor the consumption of renewable resources faster than the environment can regenerate them. We minimize the accumulation of waste from human activity and increase recovery and reuse of these by-products. We don’t continue to systematically reduce the productive capacity of the earth through processes such as overharvesting, soil erosion, destruction of green (CO2-absorbing) areas, and so on. At the same time, in a sustainable world, everyone can live with a quality of life in which all their basic human needs are met.
Meeting the basic human needs of everyone on the planet and the generations to follow inevitably implies development – electricity, clean water and sanitation systems, shelter, transportation and communication systems to provide access to critical services, and so on. In short, meeting the basic human needs of all people in the world means more and better infrastructure.

All too often, however, these twin objectives – being good stewards of the planet while developing the infrastructure to meet the basic needs of a growing global population – are seen at odds with one another. However, the logical result of this limited view – constraining development to achieve sustainability – either denies a large portion of the developing world the opportunity to live with the quality of life as we in the developed world, or requires those in the developed world to live with a significant reduction in the quality of life they now enjoy.
Not only are these alternatives unworkable, they can easily become totalitarian if carried to their logical conclusion. Meeting these twin objectives thus depends on how we choose to grow. It requires that we apply all of our human ingenuity, adaptability, and pragmatism to a project of possibilities, not limits.

Societal Issues
Clearly, infrastructure is fundamental to maintaining and improving quality of life on a global basis. However, it is just as clear that today’s infrastructure is globally inadequate. In the developing world, for example, there is a critical need for the most basic infrastructure in order to sustain life above a minimal subsistence level. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.1 billion of the world’s 6 billion people do not have adequate access to clean drinking water; and 2.6 billion do not have adequate sanitation services.

Even in the developed world, continually reinvesting in the existing infrastructure is critical. For example, the 2005 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) grades 15 aspects of infrastructure for adequacy and safety. Their overall grade is a D, down from a D+ a few years earlier. In the report, the ASCE estimates that overcoming the “infrastructure deficit” – the shortfall in terms of minimum standards of adequacy, safety, and security – will require an investment of $1.6 trillion over the next five years.

Infrastructure is also fundamental to mitigating the effects of extreme events, both natural and man-made. This is particularly important given the continuing growth of the global population and the global patterns of human migration. In 2008, for the first time in history, half of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. This means 3.3 billion urban dwellers, growing to almost 5 billion by 2030.

This increasing density of global population also increases the vulnerability to natural or man-made natural disasters, since the impact of each severe event in an urban area, in terms of both human lives and cost, will continue to rise. This vulnerability is further compounded by the fact that many of the world’s largest urban areas are located near the seacoasts, which are susceptible to extreme events, particularly flooding.

If sustainability means meeting the basic human needs for everyone on the planet, then poverty is a fundamental issue. As reported in J. F. Rischard’s book “High Noon”, half the world’s population, roughly 3 billion people, live on less than $2 per day, including 1.2 billion living in extreme poverty on less than $1 per day.

The long term solution to global poverty is not simply more charity from the developed world, though there is much more that could be done. It will depend on economic development in the poverty-stricken areas of the world. For example, according to the World Bank’s 2005 report, Connecting East Asia: A New Framework for Infrastructure, economic development in East Asia over the prior 15 years resulted in lifting 250 million people out of poverty. Investments in infrastructure were critical to achieving this result.

Our collective ability to meet human needs, and the infrastructure that enables it, is also susceptible to changes – political, economic, technological, climatic, demographic, and others. Adapting to these changes requires an adaptable infrastructure, which speaks to how we design as well as the productivity of design and build activities. In the end, putting potential policy decisions (such as ending subsidies for flood insurance in areas susceptible to flooding) aside, it is infrastructure that will provide the means of meeting the human needs in terms of safety, security, and adapting to change.

A focus on expanding, improving and maintaining the world’s infrastructure addresses many aspects of sustainability. Given the global infrastructure deficit – basic infrastructure in the developing world and inadequate infrastructure in the developed world in terms of performance, safety, and adaptability – lives are at stake today.

Environmental Issues
If the imperative to improve and expand the world’s infrastructure wasn’t reason enough to justify Bentley’s focus on infrastructure, there are additional urgent needs associated with investments in infrastructure. The first is the global challenge to the Earth’s environment, including the long-term availability of nonrenewable resources, concentrations of pollution and waste from human activity, and global climate change. For example, the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) couldn’t have been clearer regarding the impact of human activity on global climate change and its potential impact on the planet. Reasonable people may disagree on the exact nature and severity of the impact, but there is near-universal acknowledgement that the planet is warming, the climate is changing, and resources are being depleted.

The impact of human activity upon the environment is not limited to climate change alone. For example:
• Poor land management and the overuse of fertilizer are causing land degradation, soil erosion, and desertification on a massive scale in agricultural areas from the Amazon to the Yangtze. [http://7revs.csis.org/pdf/resource.pdf]
• In developing countries, 90-95 percent of sewage and 70 percent of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into the waters where they pollute the usable water supply. [http://7revs.csis.org/pdf/resource.pdf#page=2]
• By 2050, the number of cars in China could rise to 500 million. In India, the number of cars could increase to 600 million. There are 200 million vehicles currently on the road in the United States – a vehicle fleet which already consumes about 11 percent of the world’s daily oil output. [http://7revs.csis.org/pdf/resource.pdf]
• By 2020, roughly one third of the world’s population – 2 to 3 billion people – could face an acute freshwater shortage. [http://www.amazon.com/High-Noon-Twenty-Global-Problems/dp/0465070094]
• Irrigation accounts for 70 percent of the world’s water demand. More than half the water distributed by irrigation systems is lost due to leaks and wasteful practices. [http://www.amazon.com/High-Noon-Twenty-Global-Problems/dp/0465070094
Clearly, action is required if we intend to sustain a planet that can support a human society in perpetuity that provides the opportunity for all people to realize the quality of life enjoyed in the developed world. The choices we make as a global society in regard to infrastructure investments will directly affect the level of the quality of human life and the long-term health of the planet.

Professional Issues
Finally, successfully meeting these challenges will require investments in infrastructure – public and private – around the world. However, money alone is not sufficient to meet these challenges. Meeting these challenges also requires a robust global community of infrastructure professionals – engineers, designers, architects, managers, scientists, and business leaders. Unfortunately, today there is a well-documented global shortage of people possessing the requisite skills to design, build, and operate the global infrastructure required to meet the twin challenges of improved quality of life for everyone and maintaining a healthy planet.

The availability of infrastructure professionals is a critical issue. Reports from governments and private industry on this topic abound. Insufficient numbers are entering the engineering fields. A Google search on technical skill shortage will return over a million hits, listing page after page of whitepapers, news reports, seminars, conferences, government policies, and so on, all focused on assessing, mitigating, and overcoming the issue of an acute and growing shortage of technical skills.

In its 2007 Talent Shortage Survey, Manpower Inc. – a global Fortune 500 firm focused on corporate human resource issues – interviewed nearly 37,000 firms in 27 countries were to assess the impact of labor shortages in their respective regions. Globally, 41 percent of the employers reported difficulty in filling available positions due to a shortage of skilled prospects. According to the 2008 report by McGraw-Hill Construction, Key Trends in the European and U.S. Construction Marketplace, the construction workforce labor shortage “has escalated into near-crisis mode for firms around the world.” Even India faces a critical shortage of people in the construction industry.

There are many factors affecting the available pool of specialized technical talent required to confront the issues we face related to the global infrastructure – aging populations, declining birthrates, societal changes, inadequate education programs, inadequate recruiting of young people to the technical professions, and so on. Again according to Manpower, Inc., “Talent shortages exist in many areas of the global labor force today, a situation that will grow more acute and more widespread across more jobs over the next 10 years – and could threaten the engines of world economic growth and prosperity.”

Addressing this growing shortage of infrastructure professionals will require recruiting more young people worldwide to infrastructure professions. It will also require tools and technology to enable existing infrastructure professionals to be more productive as well as to collaborate on infrastructure projects regardless of where those projects exist. Responding to the sustainability imperatives for the world’s infrastructure requires a sufficient pool of well-educated, motivated, and globally connected infrastructure professionals.

Meeting the Sustainability Challenge
There are many approaches to meeting the challenges of sustainability through infrastructure. Within the infrastructure community, Bentley users work this problem one project at a time. Creating a sustainable world involves sustaining society, sustaining the environment, and sustaining the infrastructure professions.

Sustaining society is primarily about meeting human needs worldwide. It involves meeting basic human needs, improving quality of life, and improving safety and security. The following projects completed or currently being worked on by Bentley software users provide an example of each:

Meeting basic human needs: Mumbai Sewage Disposal Project
Improving quality of life: Construction of Line III of First Phase of Delhi Metro Rail
Improving safety and security: Building Landslide Disaster Forecasting System

The second sustainability challenge is to become good stewards of the planet, including its environment and its resources. One element of sustaining the environment is maintaining sufficient bio-capacity to continue to renew resources while accommodating current and future activities by humans. Approaches include increasing bio-capacity, reducing ecological footprint, and making more efficient use of nonrenewable resources. Examples of real-world projects that reflect those approaches follow:

Increasing bio-capacity: Lihir Geothermal Power Station
Reducing ecological footprint: Chalupnik House
Increasing efficient user of nonrenewable resources: Coupling Water Demand Prediction Model to Hydraulic Network Model in Real-time Operation

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 students, renewal of the pool, and enabling new professionals to find fulfilling careers. The National Engineers Week Future City Competition is an example of a highly successful initiative that focuses on attracting middle school students to the engineering professions. More information about it can be found at:
Sustaining the infrastructure professions: Future City Competition

Conclusion
The challenge we face is to provide all people a basic standard of living that enables them to look beyond surviving for another day while at the same time becoming good stewards of our planet by ensuring that we interact with the environment in a sustainable way. This is undoubtedly a tall order, but it is a challenge that must be met head on and will require all the focus and innovation that we can collectively muster.  In the end, sustainability is about nothing less than how we, as a global society, choose to live on this planet.