Engineering skill requirements to cope with the local and global challenges of the future

In the 21st century, adequate habitat and functioning infrastructure are critical for global societal and economic stability. In addition, growing urbanisation and environmental pollution cause challenges to societies. With increasing velocity, humanity faces that the current way of living is not sustainable. Thus, habitat,infrastructure, urbanisation, environment and sustainability are definitively among the most striking challenges of the 21st century. By consulting, planning, building, maintaining, exploiting and processing of global resources, civil engineers contribute significantly to the existence of these challenges. This is a high responsibility, but due to the heavy involvement, together with adjacent disciplines such as architecture, geosciences, chemistry, physics, environmental sciences and economics, civil engineers also hold the key to mitigate these challenges and provide a brighter global future. Solutions towards greener, more sustainable and economically viable materials do exist, and there is ongoing research on how greener technologies can contribute to better livelihood and economic growth, but their level of implementation is limited, a major reason for which is that these approaches require more fundamental understanding rather than standard application.