Engineering: the forgotten skill most needed in Sustainability teams

Sustainability reporting has been an undeniably powerful tool in raising the profile of the net-zero carbon movement.

As reporting and storytelling have become more sophisticated, we’re increasingly concerned we are in danger of losing a vitally important skill set along the way, engineering.

Originally, sustainability used to sit with engineering teams and they would crack on with improving the efficiency of an organisation purely from a cost saving perspective. As the importance – or popularity – of the sustainability agenda has grown because of the reputational benefits that ESG or net-zero carbon targets bring to an organisation, more and more responsibility for reporting has been handed over to people with reporting skills.

Companies don’t realise just how much the balance has shifted away from the engineers in the background actually executing energy efficiency.

Today, sustainability teams would most likely just estimate energy and carbon usage, and they would assume the energy savings.

Businesses can just claim it and no-one is necessarily pushing for that idea: “show me the carbon saved”. So, nowadays people can come into the sustainability industry highly qualified, but who have never saved a kilowatt hour or reduced actual carbon emissions. They wouldn’t necessarily know the relationship between the carbon reduction targets they report on and how that carbon is actually saved.

80% of sustainability professionals today could benefit from spending some time saving carbon rather than merely reporting on carbon.

1

We need to go back to the people who can actually save carbon, or save energy, or reduce water usage. People who can actually get the action done. And that’s the engineers, because most savings in carbon emissions are linked to either mechanical or electrical systems.

2

Sustainability teams need to remain whatever size it needs to be for the reporting side, but have engineers make a welcome return. It would be very impactful having engineers in companies who say: ‘I can take your commitments, I can take your action plan and go and deliver on it.’

Unfortunately, as it stands, engineers are kind of left in the plant room and we firmly believe that putting them into a modern sustainability department would bring huge benefits and change how the teams report.

However, some adaptation is needed from both engineers and sustainability teams to make this partnership work. Engineers are a pretty traditional bunch and often talk in a fairly black and white way – there is never a story, it either works or it doesn’t. This can sometimes clash with the way others report, but businesses need to recognise engineering skills, and how they can improve their story and help guide their sustainability journey. Both would benefit from the exposure to the other.

In order to champion carbon reduction, we need to both tell the story and do the story. If we see a shift back to action and a return to that “show me the carbon saved” mindset, you will naturally have an abundance of sustainability stories to tell.