Adapting our roads to climate change

Alumnus Kieran Dhandwar developed his interests in tackling the impact of climate change on the engineering sector while doing his summer placements at AECOM, a multinational premier infrastructure consulting firm.

When undertaking my summer placements and reading about the future of pavement design, I noticed that other than the identification that climate change would impact pavements, there was no research that actively tried to quantify the impact.

Climate change impacts everything we do, including the built environment. It is vital to understand this in engineering because our ideas and standards will need to accommodate our future climate, which will be very different within the next 50 to 100 years. Being proactive will save time, money, and most importantly, lives.

With ongoing climate change, it is critical that we assess the materials we design for our roads against future conditions. We need to do this to determine how our current methods and designs are impacted and to ensure we can find sustainable methods to mitigate these impacts. My paper successfully identified the susceptibly of Hot Rolled Asphalt (HRA) to climate change while indicating that subtle design tweaks would not be enough to ensure the longevity of our pavements. As engineers, we need to come up with better, more sustainable alternatives.

I am incredibly grateful for AECOM who saw the potential in this project on an incredibly important topic and provided me with access to their extensive laboratory facilities. The laboratory staff at AECOM also trained me to use the equipment in an efficient and safe way to ensure the most accurate results.

I aim to continue this research by testing how different materials and other mitigation techniques function in our predicted future climatic conditions. The end goal is to determine how impacted our pavements will be and how this can be reduced. Once we know how to reduce the impact of climate change on our pavements, we can then consider the most sustainable approaches.

As the winner of the East Midlands award, he has an opportunity to be published in one of the ICE technical journals.

My greatest achievement has been winning the Emerging Engineers award for my paper and presentation about my final year project on climate change and pavement materials.

This allowed me to raise awareness about the impact of climate change in engineering and hopefully inspire other engineers to start thinking about the future built environment with sustainability in mind. I aim to undertake further research to help tackle climate change within the engineering sector.