Transition engineering is the professional-engineering discipline that deals with the application of the principles of science to the design, innovation and adaptation of engineered systems that meet the needs of today without compromising the ecological, societal and economic systems on which future generations will depend to meet their own needs. Today safety is an expected consideration in design, operation and end use. Transition Engineering aims for a similar consideration of sustainability. Transition engineering is a trans-disciplinary field that addresses wicked problems while creating opportunities to increase resilience and adaptation through change projects.
Overview Engineering professions emerge when new technologies, new problems or new opportunities arise. This was the case when safety engineering grew in the early 1900s to combat the high workplace injury and fatality rates. In the 1960s, Environmental engineering emerged as a discipline to reduce industrial pollution and mitigate impacts on environmental health and water quality. Quality engineering came about with the increase in mass production techniques during WWII and the need to confirm the quality of the products. When engineered systems must change, either due to failure risks, obsolescence or modernisation, change management is a well-known process. Transition Engineering is focused on identifying the unsustainable aspects of currently operational engineered systems, innovating the projects that down-shift the unsustainable energy, material, environmental and social aspects, and then carrying out an inclusive change management process. There are two serious problems driving the emergence of Transition Engineering; the exponential growth in the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and the lack of growth and imminent decline of conventional oil production sometimes characterised as peak oil. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ran past the "climate safe" 350 ppm range in the 1990s, and has now exceeded 420ppm, a level that Earth has not known for 800,000 years. Transition engineering aims to take advantage of the current access to the remaining lower cost and higher EROI energy resources to re-develop all aspects of urban and industrial engineered systems to adapt as fossil fuel use is dramatically reduced.
Emerging Pan-Disciplinary Field Recognition of the field of Transition Engineering and Energy Transition Engineering started in 2010 when the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Prestige Lecture in NZ was given by Associate Professor Susan Krumdieck, University of Canterbury. In 2014 the engineering text book, "Principles of Sustainable Energy Systems" by Professor Frank Kreith, featured Chapter 13 on Transition Engineering. In 2017, Transition Engineering was invited for Chapter 32 the book "Energy Solutions to Combat Global Warming". In 2019, a full text on the methodologies and principles of transition engineering was published, "Transition Engineering, Building a Sustainable Future". Since 2015, Transition Engineering has been taught at the university level in a range of full courses, workshops, guest lectures and seminars. Courses have been held in Grenoble INP, France; Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany; University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany; University of Bristol, UK; at University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Heriot-Watt University, Scotland. In 2020 the first on-line courses were offered continuing professional development for engineers and other professionals.
Origins The idea behind transition engineering originated from many different roots, both technical and non-technical. The concept of sustainable development has been around since 1987 and the problem of sustainability was a driving force in the development of transition engineering. The Transition Town movement provided further inspiration as it showed that there were many groups of people around the world motivated to prepare for peak oil and climate change. Transition towns and ecovillages demonstrate the need for engineers to build systems that manage un-sustainable risks and provide people with sustainable options. Engineers are ethically required to "hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public" and answer society's need for sustainable development The origins of safety engineering provided much of the inspiration for transition engineering. At the beginning of the 1900s, business owners viewed workplace safety as a wasted investment and politicians were slow to change. After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed 156 trapped workers, 62 engineers came together to investigate how to make the workplace a safer place to be. This eventually lead to the formation of the American Society of Safety Engineers. As safety engineering manages the risks of unsafe conditions, transition engineering manages the risks of unsustainable conditions. To give engineers a better grasp of sustainability, transition engineering defines the problem as UN-sustainability. This is similar to the problem of un-safe conditions that is the purpose of safety engineering. We do not necessarily know what a perfectly safe system looks like, but we do know what unsafe systems look like and how to improve them; the same applies to unsustainability of systems. By reducing unsustainability issues we take steps in the right direction
The Seven Step Method The Transition Engineering method involves seven steps to help engineers develop projects to deal with changing unsustainable activities. As a discipline, Transition Engineering recognizes that "Business as Usual" projections of future scenarios from past trends are not valid because the underlying conditions have changed sufficiently from the conditions of the past. For example, the projection of future oil supply in 2050 from data prior to 2005 would give an expectation of a 50% increase in demand over that time-frame. However, the actual production rate of conventional oil has not increased since 2005 and is projected to decline by more than 50% by 2050.
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