Teaching environmental impact assessment for present and future engineers: Current and future trends

Abstract

Demand for environmental impact assessment skills among decision-making engineers has led to a considerable evolution of the pedagogical offer in universities and companies. The offered courses focus on providing trainees with the competencies required to evaluate the environmental footprint of a product or a service, and mitigate those accordingly. To understand the various trends of such teachings, and identify their main challenges, this paper investigates key courses and teaching approaches used among the engineering students of the Grenoble Alps University. To do so, a framework was developed where the IPAT equation was used as a basis to analyze three types of courses: contextual, methodological, and integrated. Findings from the analysis were discussed, leading to the proposal of five future trends, such as integration of relevant training stakeholders in the definition of the main pedagogical strategy, and the formalization of a framework for the testing of tools developed inside partner research institutes.