Preserving what matters: Why resilience is engineering’s next great responsibility

Several weeks ago, devastating flooding struck Nepal adjacent to Bihar, the state in India where one of us grew up. Even from halfway across the world, this tragedy felt deeply personal. Roads disappeared. Critical connections that people rely on every day vanished in a matter of hours. People lost their lives. Just like that, individual and community life changed.

Here, we asked ourselves how engineering should respond in the face of such a tragedy—even one at a scale so enormous it seems overwhelming.

This is a call for engineers to think differently about their role. Engineering alone cannot prevent every tragedy or solve every challenge in isolation. Our greatest contributions often come from helping to connect people, knowledge and systems in ways that allow communities to adapt and endure.

Infrastructure like roads and utility lines is what allows daily life to function. It connects people to work, healthcare, education and opportunity. It brings clean water into homes and moves goods throughout the economy. Most days, we barely notice it. When it fails, however, its importance becomes impossible to ignore.

As engineers, we often talk about creating a better future. We focus on innovation, discovery and progress—and of course those goals are important in driving what we do.

Yet there’s another growing challenge demanding our attention: ensuring the systems people depend on continue to serve future generations.

That might sound less inspiring than building something new. In fact, it might seem like the opposite of progress. In reality, however, it very well could one of engineering’s most important responsibilities—one we cannot undertake without participating in a much broader conversation.

For decades, engineers designed infrastructure using historical patterns as a guide. Roads, bridges, power systems and water networks were designed and built based on data about how communities functioned and how infrastructure helped people interact with their natural capital—water, energy, habitat and atmosphere.

Today, we’re living in a time of increasing uncertainty. Technologies are changing rapidly, demands on infrastructure continue to grow and events once considered extraordinary seem to occur more frequently than any models ever anticipated.

The challenge is not simply to build stronger systems. It is to build systems that can adapt. Resilience is not about predicting the future; rather, it is about preparing for a wider range of possibilities.

And that requires a different mindset. One insight from engineering practice is that resilience is often less about building the next biggest and best thing and more about preserving what’s important: mobility, clean water, reliable energy, economic opportunity and public safety. In other words, preserving the continuity of daily life and the conditions that allow communities to thrive.

This is why we cannot view resilience solely as an infrastructure challenge. It is ultimately a quality-of-life challenge. When infrastructure performs well, people rarely notice it. Children get to school, businesses operate and people stay connected to essential services.

At UW-Madison, we believe deeply in the Wisconsin Idea: that knowledge should impact people’s lives beyond the boundaries of campus.

Resilience represents an important opportunity to put that principle into practice. No single discipline owns this challenge—and meaningful progress depends on bringing together expertise from across society to better understand risks, evaluate tradeoffs and make informed decisions.

Wisconsin is particularly well positioned to contribute. Our state has a long tradition of turning ideas into practical solutions, and our College of Engineering brings together researchers, industry partners and communities willing to engage in solving difficult problems.

Engineers should be among those helping society answer critical questions: How should communities prepare for an increasingly uncertain future? How should we invest limited resources? How do we preserve the systems people depend on while still continuing to innovate?

The recent flooding in Nepal was a tragedy, but also a reminder that the systems that support modern life deserve our attention long before disaster strikes. As engineers, our responsibility is not only to invent new possibilities, but also to safeguard the foundations upon which opportunity, prosperity and quality of life depend.

The future will continue to be uncertain. The time to think about resilience is long before a crisis occurs. If resilience ultimately is about preserving what matters, then our challenge is clear: build the systems, partnerships and knowledge that help communities adapt, endure and thrive.

Devesh Ranjan (MSME ’05, PhDME ’07) is Grainger Dean of the College of Engineering. John Nelson (MSME ’76) is retired CEO of Affiliated Engineers. He currently is an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison and chief technical officer for Fitzgerald Asset Management.

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