Implementation of Sustainable Planning and Building in Civil Engineering Ethics

The effects of planning and building on health, safety, and well-being of the community and the environment bears an enormous burden of responsibility on civil engineers. A total of 38% of the CO2-emissions worldwide can be traced back to the construction industry. Thus, planning and building in respect with nature and natural resources has become a topic of increasing importance in civil and structural engineering. Global warming, dwindling resources, and increased environmental pollution force the construction industry to develop new strategies for planning and building in the next decades. Sustainability has become one of the key factors in construction and has found its way in the engineers’ daily work life. Consequently, in the last years, this issue was implemented in professional codes of ethics. Codes of ethics or codes of professional conduct are developed by engineers’ organizations or professional associations They express the rights, duties, and obligations of the members of the profession and shall serve as a guide in making decisions. Considering new challenges in the building industry, adjustments to the codes are necessary to guide civil engineers in their daily work life for the benefit of health, safety, and well-being of the community and the environment. The paper briefly presents the most recent research results to advance sustainability in construction. The authors evaluated recent publications and were informed by their research. Furthermore, they analyzed codes of ethics and professional conduct published by several engineering associations worldwide and herein discuss if these guidelines are able to support sustainable planning and building. The conclusion is that sustainability has become the central topic in planning and building, and it consequently affects the daily work life of civil engineers now and increasingly in the future. Consequently, nearly all engineering associations define sustainability as a value and principle that shall influence the decisions in engineering practice. However, most of the codes contain less detailed information for engineers about how to balance conflicting stakeholders’ interests and how to behave correctly to support sustainable planning and building.