Civil and Environmental Engineering Professional Skills Assessment

The following activity is designed to prompt expression of your knowledge of and ability to apply engineering professional skills. Its purpose is to determine how well your engineering program has taught you these skills. By participating, you are giving your consent to have your posts used for academic research purposes. When your posts are evaluated by the program assessment committee, your names will be removed.  To post a comment: 1)  click on the Sign In button in the upper right hand corner of the blog page, then sign in using your gmail account and password (If you don’t have a gmail account, sign up for one – it only takes a couple minutes); 2) scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the word “comments,” which appears right below the list of sources.

Time line: You will have 2 weeks to complete the on-line discussion as a team. Use this blog to capture your thoughts, perspectives, ideas, and revisions as you work together on this problem. This activity is discussion-based, meaning you will participate through a collaborative exchange and critique of each other’s ideas and work. The goal is to challenge and support one another as a team to tap your collective resources and experiences to dig more deeply into the issue(s) raised in the scenario. Since the idea is that everyone in the discussion will refine his/her ideas through the discussion that develops, you should try to respond well before the activity ends so that the discussion has time to mature. It is important to make your initial posts and subsequent responses in a timely manner. You are expected to make multiple posts during each stage of this on-going discussion. The timeline below suggests how to pace your discussion. This is just a suggestion. Feel free to pace the discussion as you see fit.

Tuesday Week 1 Initial Posts: All participants post initial responses to these instructions (see below) and the scenario.

Thursday Week 1 Response Posts: Participants respond by tying together information and perspectives on important points and possible approaches. Participants identify gaps in information and seek to fill those gaps.

Tuesday Week 2 Refine Posts: Participants work toward agreement on what is most important, determine what they still need to find out, & evaluate one or more approaches from the previous week’s discussion.

Thursday Week 2 Polish Final Posts: Participants come to an agreement on what is most important, and propose one or more approaches to address the issue/s.

Discussion Instructions

Imagine that you are a team of engineers working together for a company or organization to address the issue raised in the scenario.  Discuss what your team would need to take into consideration to begin to address the issue.  You do not need to suggest specific technical solutions, but identify the most important factors and suggest one or more viable approaches.

Suggestions for discussion topics

·         Identify the primary and secondary problems raised in the scenario.

·         Who are the major stakeholders and what are their perspectives?

·         What outside resources (people, literature/references, and technologies) could be engaged in developing viable approaches?

·         Identify related contemporary issues.

·         Brainstorm a number of feasible approaches to address the issue.

·         Consider the following contexts: economic, environmental, cultural/societal, and global. What impacts would the approaches you brainstormed have on these contexts?

·         Come to agreement on one or more viable approaches and state the rationale.

Water Shortages

How do you fit 140 liters of water into a small cup? Fill it with coffee. The amount of water used to brew coffee is only a tiny fraction of that needed to grow the beans, convert them to a usable form and get them into your cup. That is why it takes 140 liters of fresh water to make just a single cup of coffee. Other common foodstuffs require even more. A hamburger, for instance, requires 2,400 liters of water, counting the water that goes to irrigating the wheat and producing the cattle feed.

The World Bank reports that 80 countries now have water shortages that threaten health and economies while 40 percent of the world — more than 2 billion people — have no access to clean water or sanitation. Only a few per cent of the world’s supplies of water are suitable for human use, and they are under increasing stress – from population growth, climate change and pollution. Unless the world can find better ways of managing water, the chances of producing enough food for a rapidly growing population – forecast to reach at least 9 billion people by 2050 – are small.
Population growth alone does not account for increased water demand. Since 1900, there has been a six-fold increase in water use for only a two-fold increase in population size. This reflects greater water usage associated with rising standards of living (e.g., diets containing less grain and more meat). It also reflects potentially unsustainable levels of irrigated agriculture.
Meanwhile many countries suffer accelerating desertification. Water quality is deteriorating in many areas of the developing world as population increases and salinity caused by industrial farming and over-extraction rises. About 95 percent of the world's cities still dump raw sewage into their waters.

There are several principal manifestations of the water crisis.

• Inadequate access to safe drinking water for about 884 million people
• Inadequate access to water for sanitation and waste disposal for 2.5 billion people
• Groundwater over drafting (excessive use) leading to diminished agricultural yield
• Overuse and pollution of water resources harming biodiversity
• Regional conflicts over scarce water resources sometimes resulting in warfare

·         1 billion people live without clean drinking water

More than a dozen nations receive most of their water from rivers that cross borders of neighboring countries viewed as hostile. These include Botswana, Bulgaria, Cambodia, the Congo, Gambia, the Sudan, and Syria, all of whom receive 75 percent or more of their fresh water from the river flow of often hostile upstream neighbors.

In the United States, the Ogallala aquifer, the world’s third-largest, has fallen several meters in recent years, causing fertile regions to dry out and forcing farmers to revert to more basic crops, which generate less income. At current rates, the aquifer will dry up in 20 to 30 years.

More frequently water is being likened to another resource that quickened global tensions when its supplies were threatened. A story in The Financial Times of London began: "Water, like energy in the late 1970s, will probably become the most critical natural resource issue facing most parts of the world by the start of the next century." This analogy is also reflected in the oft-repeated observation that water will likely replace oil as a future cause of war between nations.

Facts List

·         2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation

·         1.8 million people die every year from diarrhoeal diseases.

·         3 900 children die every day from water borne diseases

·         Daily per capita use of water by liter in residential areas: North America & Japan - 350; Europe – 200; sub-Saharan Africa -10 to 20

·         Quantity of water by liter needed to produce 1 kg of:

o   wheat: 1 000 L

o   rice: 1 400 L

o   beef: 13 000 L

Sources

Global Water Shortage Looms In New Century. (2011). Arizona Water Center Website http://ag.arizona.edu/AZWATER/awr/dec99/Feature2.htm

Water Scarcity: We must wring more from each precious drop. (October 14, 2010).The Financial Times.

The World Water Council. http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/index.php?id=25

Progress in Drinking-water and Sanitation: special focus on sanitation. (July 17, 2008) WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. 

Updated Numbers: WHO-UNICEF JMP Report 2008. http://www.unicef.org/media/media_44093.html.