Re: “Engineers face ethical dilemma,” comment, July 6.
Chris Kennedy makes an excellent point about the ethical issues faced by engineers with respect to climate change. Beyond that, even if engineers manage to ignore the ethics, there are practical considerations of climate-change legal-liability risks that they face with respect to their clients.
Take the case of buildings. Buildings are long-lived assets. Most buildings in Canada have intentional design lives of at least 50 years, with some owners asking for design life of a hundred years or more.
Regardless of intended design life, in practice many buildings continue to be used beyond these time spans — just look at the “temporary” buildings built during the Second World War that are still in use, more than 70 years later, at the University of Victoria.
Climate change is a reality, and many of its future impacts, within the time horizon of a new building’s intended life, are foreseeable and have been quantified. These include carbon taxes, hotter, drier summers, more intense rainfall events, increased coastal flooding and risk of obsolescence as transport infrastructure changes, among others. These impacts pose future risks and liabilities to buildings designed today, and should be considered by building owners who are commissioning new buildings.
Professional engineers and architects have a duty of care to clients in this issue and face potential liability and risk of future lawsuits if they don’t advise clients on the risks they face, offer advice to mitigate those risks and document, for the record, the risks and advice.
Alex Zimmerman
Victoria
