A Strategy For Teaching Sustainability Assessment

Educating engineers to be active in sustainable development is by no means a trivial task and the challenge has been pursued by several universities and organisations around the world. At DTU MAN research and teaching is focused on engineering management tools. In the section for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment (QSA) the research and teaching is embedded in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) tools. Our vision is that all engineers graduating from DTU are taught a basic knowledge about sustainability and the methods and tools to assess the sustainability of their decisions. Our strategy for the teaching address three target groups and follows two routes.  One route provides in-depth education for students aiming to specialise in quantitative sustainability assessment. A variety of courses ranging from production level through company level to society level will be offered.  The second route aims to present concepts of sustainability and potential impacts of the specific technology field as well as methods and tools for specific domains, i.e. nano technology. It is targeted two groups of students at the different technological domains at DTU; those specifically working in innovation and technology development and engineers developing solutions based on existing technologies. The DTU curricula will integrate sustainability assessment in introductory courses at bachelor level, whereas master level courses goes more in detail with the specific sustainability issues for that technology domain and introduces quantitative tools to assess sustainability. The proposed strategy embeds sustainability throughout the engineering curriculum.