Search

Sustainability in university curricula remains important for equipping graduates from all disciplines with capabilities to respond to complex social, economic, and environmental challenges in their future professional roles. Situating sustainability learning within disciplinary contexts is needed for learners to apply sustainability theory to their future professions. Furthermore, developing capabilities is important to enable graduates to act in differing professional contexts. In response to these needs, this paper contextualises safety as part of sustainability in undergraduate engineering studies by exploring the complementarity between professional capabilities for safety in engineering and key capabilities found in sustainability education literature. The paper draws on findings from interviews with 41 pipeline engineers undertaken to build an understanding of differing views on engineering capabilities necessary for safety decision making. The results show synergies between safety and sustainability capabilities in the context of engineering practice and the opportunities to contextualise safety within sustainability in engineering education. From a safety perspective, given the expanding sustainable development agenda, there is an opportunity to increase education for public safety in engineering curricula within the scope of sustainability education and to shift learning from competencies to capabilities-based outcomes.

Increasing regulatory and market changes that decouple fossil fuels from the built environment will require existing trade practitioners to upskill. However, the structure of the construction sector, which includes short-term contracts, tight deadlines, high reliance on contingent labor, and a large proportion of small-business contractors who are responsible for their own training makes upskilling challenging. Consideration of the industry's structure and the characteristics of small trade business learning practices is necessary for any upskilling program. Plumbing is a key example of a trade requiring upskilling for a low-carbon economy. The gas fitting component of plumbing work will change dramatically with the phasing out of carbon-producing natural gas and substitution with alternatives such as hydrogen. This study used a survey of 1,001 Australian plumbers, informed by the theory of planned behavior (TPB), to understand the learning contexts and needs of plumbers in upskilling and ascertain attitudinal, social, and structural enablers for training behavior. The results show that attitudes to training, including the perceived benefits of training for skills development and end-user safety, are the key motivator for plumbers' training behavior, whereas social norms and behavioral controls such as time and cost are somewhat influential. The findings provide insight into training behavior enablers that can be leveraged to support the roll-out of upskilling for low-carbon technologies and ongoing trades training programs more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature on regulatory compliance is extensive, little scholarly attention has focused on how companies respond to conflicting regulatory requirements. As a case in point, gas pipelines and networks—deemed monopolies—are subject to economic regulation to emulate the price pressures of competition and encourage "efficient" expenditure. Technical (safety) regulation of the same infrastructure also addresses an expenditure trade‐off with safety, potentially drawing different conclusions as to the most appropriate balance. This article reports on a study—drawing on 49 interviews, document review and case studies—analyzing if these two regulatory regimes, as enacted in Australia, are in conflict. We find a significant tension between the two regimes, exhibited through the impact that economic regulation has on a company's planned safety‐related expenditure and thus, long‐term public safety outcomes may be at risk. Australian safety regulation is performance‐based, requiring "reasonably practicable" measures are in place to minimize risk to the public. The San Bruno California disaster, in which eight people died as a result of failed gas infrastructure in the US, shows that such regulatory conflicts also exist in jurisdictions that have adopted prescriptive forms of safety regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed increased individual sanctions for engineers in the event of a major failure such as the Deepwater Horizon blowout. The medical profession experienced a similar trend, which has been well-documented. Fears of litigation have resulted in defensive medicine, practices aimed at reducing doctors' risk of legal liability, sometimes to the detriment of patient care. To date, the emergence of defensive engineering has received only minimal attention. An exploratory survey was conducted with Australian engineers (n=275) about their responses to personal liability concerns, guided by observable trends among medical doctors. The analysis compared reported engineering practices with those adopted in the medical profession. The prevalence of consideration of liability and adoption of defensive practices is such that defensive engineering can be considered to be established behavior. Engineers are responding particularly by using extra or augmented resources and increased reliance on routine. Some defensive practices are more insidious in medicine than in engineering, giving insight into the potential path these concerns could take if left unchecked, including the impact on current trends in civil engineering education.