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Engineering for Sustainable Development goes Texel

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Thinking of Sustainability or Making it happen?

This was the teaser question used to get the attention of all Master students at Delft University of Technology to sign-up for the course of Engineering for Sustainable Development (a compulsory course for students who want to receive the Technology in Sustainable Development annotation to their TU Delft degree certificate).

TU Delft engineers can play an important role in sustainable development. As sustainability problems cover different disciplinary fields at the same time and cannot be tackled by only one of them, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary. In addition, there needs to be more in place than just technology for innovations to become implemented widely.

To learn making contributions to sustainability transitions, every year a group of students from different faculties enrol for a research project on sustainability together – i.e. the course Engineering for sustainable Development. The course aims to improve the capacities of engineers to contribute to sustainability. This year, students are learning by doing research about the transition of Texel to become a sustainable island. The municipality of Texel is our ‘client’, as are the local entrepreneurs that support our project. From their perspective, in the past years many sustainable initiatives were developed: in 2008 the municipality planned to have 100% sustainable energy in 2020. Many initiatives for wind turbines, solar panels and blue energy were set up. Next year, in 2015, Texel will get sustainable street lighting. Furthermore, a cooperative business initiative for sustainable energy production was started: Texel Energy. The ferry commissioned a sustainable ferry and e-cars and uses auto-mooring. Inhabitants work on energy neutral housing. Entrepreneurs initiated a sustainable harbour, agriculture at sea and at saline soils, restaurants serve locally produced food and beer etc. In short, Texel is an icon project for other Dutch municipalities and serves as experimental garden for sustainable initiatives. Nevertheless, it is perceived that these initiatives do not necessarily build up to a transition to a sustainable island. All this, making the perfect playground for students to tap in and make real contributions. Students are currently designing Sustainable Texel as a socio technical system by investigating what is needed for a sustainability transition for the island divided in 8 sub-systems namely Agriculture, Health & happiness, Leisure & Knowledge, Materials & Waste, Public space, Sustainable mobility, Texel as host and Water cycle.

The virtual research environment being-here.net offers a framework that goes beyond student’s disciplinary perspective and supports integrating knowledge to make transitions happen. The research is informed not only by scientific literature but also by sustainability professionals like consultants from Except Integrated Sustainability (http://www.except.nl/), the Dutch Transition Research Institute (DRIFT), YESDElft and Motiv. To highlight, in the second week Except Integrated Sustainability delivered a workshop on which they introduced to their methodology (Sustainability in Symbiosis) and one of the tools (ELSIA) they regularly use in their projects which is very adaptable and showed an easy way to gain an integrated view of potential issues and solutions. Except also shared a model of a Sustainable Island Scan that addresses 13 key areas that have to be taken into account when looking at islands, which was very insightful for the purpose of the course. Roel van Raak from DRIFT, gave a lecture on his research on waste cycles and separation of the all municipalities in the Netherlands. In addition, he also gave his personal view and experience on how you as a researcher or engineer have to deal with the practice and the different stakeholders you are involved with. Motiv brought to the students a perspective on Leadership to achieve sustainability, especially by stressing out the importance of soft skills like resilience.

During the first week of December 2014, students pitched their progress to classmates and course managers from a sub-system perspective. Many overlaps and trade-offs were already identified. The realization of how complex is to come up with a sustainability criteria also emerged. A good example of this kind complexity was the one presented by the “Health & Happiness” subsystem team to define a Happiness indicator; their discussion went around satisfaction with life or health. Then they opted for using the Happy Planet Index approach to create a customized one for the Texel case. A good example of the progress made in regards of the design of solutions of sustainable pathways in Texel was the use of principles of the Blue Economy in the design of the bio cycle of Texel as part of the “Materials & Waste” subsystem team.

The above are just couple of examples of the progress made by the different teams. All the progress and content generated, as well as the entire program of the course can be seen here.

Students finalized their on January 12-16 spending a week in Texel finalizing their solutions, interacting with locals, incorporating their feedback and presenting a final report to the Alderman and locals. In addition, a love story of as part of Sustainable Texel emerged:

Meanwhile, local press has shown interest too:

 

 

 

 

 

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