Engineering for One Planet (EOP) and our partners brought a strong sustainability focus to this year’s 2024 Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) — which included a presentation by Lemelson Foundation President Eric Lemelson about how to define sustainability in new ways to address our global climate crisis.

“Incrementalism is not a viable approach,” Lemelson said. He highlighted the need to update the most widely accepted meaning of the term sustainability — first described at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm — into a more relevant description that meets the urgency of the current moment. 

“My definition is highly aspirational,” he explained. “It describes fundamental changes in the ways we power our world and interact with the Earth and each other on an individual and societal level.” 

He also stressed the importance of the current generation in tackling our climate challenges with a new sustainability mindset and updated skill sets. “I believe that young people must lead us out of this crisis,” he said. “In fact, I think they’re the only path to a real future, a sustainable future.

Lemelson pointed to areas where green job skills are urgently needed — including to refine clean energy technologies, address hard-to-abate sectors like steel, concrete, and manufacturing, and develop potential moonshot solutions.

“If we want to create a truly sustainable future, we need to completely rethink how we design and build products,” he said. 

The EOP initiative is designed to make immediate and transformational curricular change so that all future engineers are prepared to design, build, and code with the planet in mind.

“Engineering education needs to lead the way,” Lemelson concluded. “Engineers can act, engineering professors can teach, and engineering deans can lead the process.”

To read more on Eric Lemelson’s definition of sustainability, click here.