Plotting a Course for Water Sustainability By Way of Engineering Ethics

Engineers influence the sustainability of water everyday by the choices they make in practice, research and teaching. Decisions about water often lead to ethical dilemmas since water serves multiple, sometimes competing, purposes. Notably, drinking water and sanitation are deemed human rights under the UN Millennium Development Goals.

This session describes a course, Engineering Ethics for Sustainable Water, aimed at sensitizing engineers to the ethics of their decisions, especially at a time of increasing water scarcity.  Traditional ethics, focused on evaluating decisions within the context of human relationships, is reviewed and extended with three sustainability dimensions: environment, economics and equity. The course explains tools that empower people to assess the ethics and sustainability of their decisions, e.g., life-cycle analysis for intergenerational equity.

Case studies are presented that offer engineers practice in identifying, evaluating and resolving ethical dilemmas in policy, corporations, and research showing water use trade-offs between agriculture, energy, habitat, etc.