Technical Bulletins on Climate Change in Civil and Environmental Engineering
ASCE Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate
Climate Adaptation Engineering Bulletin No. 4
Incorporating Climate Change in Undergraduate Civil Engineering Education
Incorporating climate non-stationarity in the practice of civil engineering and in civil engineering undergraduate education presents significant challenges. There is a need in engineering education in general for a broad understanding of the effects of climate change and, in civil engineering, accommodating the specifics of climate change leading to resilient and sustainable design varies uniquely with each sub-discipline (i.e. such as transportation, structural, geotechnical, ports and harbors, water resources, civil/site development and environmental, including stormwater management, water supply, wastewater and solid waste).
Adding content to baccalaureate level civil engineering programs is particularly challenging. The number of credit hours required for a BSCE degree is generally fixed and either difficult or impossible to expand due to university-wide constraints. Taking into account university core course requirements, meeting the ABET General Criteria (Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs, 2024 - 2025 - ABET)) and including the course requirements needed to educate students in the broad practice areas of civil engineering, including the requirements of the ABET Civil Engineering Program Criteria, typically renders adding new courses to the fully loaded curriculum difficult. This is further complicated with external support courses, such as statistics, not containing key topics relevant to integrating relevant statistical concepts such as stationarity vs non-stationarity. Furthermore, not all universities offering civil engineering degrees have complementary courses in meteorology or climate sciences and when they are, may not be accessible to civil engineering majors. Within that context, civil engineering programs throughout the US are presently considering how to meet the challenge of incorporating climate change in civil engineering undergraduate curricula.
The ABET Civil Engineering Program Criteria have changed in the last several years in a significant way, first relevant to program evaluations in the 2024-25 academic year. Among the changes is this: “The curriculum must include application of…principles of … sustainability, risk and resilience…to civil engineering problems”. Prior to 2024-25, sustainability was listed as a curriculum requirement, but risk and resilience were not. Programs are evaluated typically every six years. These changes were proposed by ASCE and adopted by ABET after a process over several years providing notice of the proposed changes. From now on, programs will need to provide documentation during program evaluations of how risk and resilience are incorporated into the curriculum.
Each year, ASCE provides suggested guidance on meeting the Civil Engineering Program Criteria by publishing the “ASCE Commentary on the ABET Program Criteria for Civil and Similarly Named Programs” (civil-engineering-program-criteria-commentary---aug-2025.pdf). The 2024-25 Commentary provides guidance on what is meant by risk and resilience in a civil engineering context, as follows:
“Resiliency is the ability of a system to withstand an extreme event and recover efficiently. Extreme events have a probability of occurrence during the lifespan of the civil engineering system. The recovery from these extreme events has economic, environmental, and social costs that can be calculated.”
“The definition and importance of risk in civil engineering are outlined in ASCE Policy 437 (Policy statement 437 - Risk management | ASCE): “Risk assessment is the characterization of the potential adverse effects that hazards can inflict on people, property, or the environment, often with both stochastic and deterministic inputs.” (ASCE 2022). Resiliency links sustainability to risk because understanding the risks of extreme events is essential to building resilient infrastructure. Further, climate change increases risk due to certain extreme events.
The criterion does not require a program to include sustainability, risk, and resilience in all student experiences or include them in multiple contexts. It does not require that all factors influencing risk, resilience, and sustainability be included in the curriculum, but only that students be exposed to the concepts and their application to civil engineering.”
The CE Program Criteria Commentary goes on to provide examples of both risk and resilience. Many of both the risk and the resilience examples are directly related to climate change; others are not. It is up to the individual program to decide on the risks and resilience to be incorporated, and to document how those topics are addressed through the curriculum.
The ASCE Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge Task Committee also recently surveyed members on how they define resilience to see if that definition needed updating and to provide more examples.
Now is the time for civil engineering programs to modify their baccalaureate level programs to incorporate addressing risk and resilience in civil engineering and to document the curriculum components to Program Evaluators (PEV’s) at periodic accreditation visits. Programs are likely to consider including climate change, resiliency and risk content in entry level engineering courses, in upper-level courses in specific civil engineering practice areas (as examples, such as the use and application of Atlas 15, Volume 2, precipitation projections in hydraulics courses, and the forward-looking climate provisions of Chapter 36 of ASCE 7-28 in upper level structural courses), and in senior level capstone courses as project tasks. This will require additions to established and well-honed lecture materials and may require coordination with climate science faculty. A recent American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) paper presented climate change content in an introductory level civil engineering course ASEE PEER - Teaching Climate Change in an Introductory Civil Engineering Course and a National Science Foundation publication addressed integrating climate resilience across civil engineering curricula (Integrating Climate Change Into Engineering Education). Additional ASEE presentations on integrating climate change across the undergraduate curriculum would be helpful as academic programs focus on best practices for teaching climate change. The University Consortium for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) through its COMET-MetEd Program (https://meted.ucar.edu/) provides self-guided education-and-training modules that can supplement civil engineering program curricula.
A recently formed ASCE Committee on Advancing Accreditation, part of the Committee on Workforce and Education, is in the process of re-imagining civil engineering program criteria necessary for the preparation of the civil engineer of the future. As the teaching of civil engineering changes in the future, climate adaptation and resilience merits focus.
Due to the challenges presented by full curricula and the likely need for teaching innovation and collaboration among climate science and engineering faculty, this is easier said than done. Incorporating climate resilience in civil engineering graduate coursework presents similar challenges. Risk, resilience, and sustainability are topics that should lend themselves to being incorporated in targeted locations in the curriculum, not as stand-alone courses but as integral parts of a broad civil engineering education. This is critically important to the future practice of civil engineering. We must produce climate-literate, resilience-ready civil engineers.
Technical Bulletins on Climate Change in Civil and Environmental Engineering are prepared by the American Society of Civil Engineers Committee on Adaptation to Climate Change, Dan Walker, Ph.D., and Craig Musselman, P.E., editors. Input for this bulletin was provided by William Capehart, Ph.D. and Shirley Clark, Ph.D. Manuscripts are reviewed by assigned members of the CACC Committee on Climate Intelligence in Standards and Practice. These Engineering Bulletins are intended to alert the reader to emerging topics related to climate change in engineering practice and are not intended to act as a substitute for any sources cited herein.