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MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development

global challenges, engineering solutions
 
Prof Fenner paper wins award

Professor Dick Fenner and his co-authors Dr Lan Hoag (IBM) and Maggie Skandarian (Portland Bureau of Environmental Services, USA) have been highly commended in the Outstanding Paper Award by the Journal of Flood Risk Management.

The paper is "A conceptual approach for evaluating the multiple benefits of urban flood management practices", published by the Journal of Flood Risk Management and can be found at the following link.

These awards consider all papers published in volume 11 of the journal during 2018.  The paper was based on work carried out under EPSRC’s Blue Green Cities project and develops  a spatial analysis of the dominant and relevant benefits of urban flood management based on context and location specific evaluations. It proposes a detailed methodology for assessing new concepts of  benefit profile and benefit intensity, used to describe flood management practices which utilise green infrastructure.

The paper provides a case study based on the application of these concepts in Portland, Oregon to evaluate some of the multiple benefits of the East Lents Floodplain Restoration Project.

 

Course Overview

Context

The need to engage in better problem definition through careful dialogue with all stakeholder groups and a proper recognition of context.

Perspectives

An ability to work with specialists from other disciplines and professional groups acknowledging that technical innovation and business skills also must be understood, nurtured and combined as precursors to the successful implementation of sustainable solutions.

Change

An understanding of mechanisms for managing change in organisations so future engineers are equipped to play a leadership role.

Tools

An awareness of a range of assessment frameworks, sustainability metrics and methodologies such as Life Cycle Analysis, Systems Dynamics, Multi-Criteria Decision making and Impact Assessment.