By John Challen

Juan Sebastian Canavera Herrera, Senior Sustainability Engineer, Foster + Partners, started life as a civil engineer in his native Colombia, not on roads, but on airport runways. The country is sensitive to climate-related hazards, and in 2010/11, the rainy season was the one of the worst in its recent history.

“That time told me that those events were going to be happening more often and, as civil engineers, we had – and still have – a duty to prepare our infrastructure for it,” he says. “My PhD had a socio-technical approach, in which I used social methods in civil engineering to understand the need and perspective of looking at resilience as a multidisciplinary problem, rather than just a technical problem.”

Risk and change

Today, Canavera Herrera is part of the engineering team at the architectural firm Foster + Partners and a member of the World Road Association, representing the UK on a technical committee. This experience gives him a good idea of the skills required to succeed when it comes to resilience.

“In my view, resilience is, by itself, a topic that requires you to be quite comfortable being a multidisciplinary person who can speak different languages from different disciplines,” he states. “And this comes from how I define resilience in a simple way: the simultaneous management of risk and management of change.

“The management of risk has traditionally been the area [for] natural sciences and engineering. The skills we have as engineers are very useful there, because it's about understanding physics, the climate and probability. As well as these mathematical physical skills, and also learning about subjects such as hydrology, which I had to do during my undergrad, you also have to understand materials – how temperature and different conditions affect them. 

“But then there's the other aspect, the management of change, which traditionally has been done by the social sciences and humanities,” he adds. “It's all about how we modify our organisations and human systems to deal with changing conditions.”

Canavera Herrera likens the two areas to two wheels on a bicycle: “It's not impossible to ride a bicycle with one wheel, but it's not very stable, so the best way to do it and move forward is having both wheels at the same time.”

When it comes to training, Canavera Herrera says more people need to understand the science of the climate, something most don't get educated on when learning how to be an engineer or transport planner.

“When you study to be a transport planner, there are some aspects of hydrology you need to think about, because you're going to be dealing with water and drainage. But I think there's a need within training to understand how [the] climate works and how is it going to change in the future,” he concludes. 

“Training yourself on understanding how climate projections are made, and how they might affect your work, is also important. Not forgetting how to calculate risk and learning about nature-based solutions, because they are both large parts of resilience.”

Next steps

Juan Sebastian Canavera Herrera contributed to CIHT’s recent ‘Delivering a resilient transport network’ report.

Newsletter image: a flooded road in Wiltshire, England; credit: Shutterstock.

Juan Sebastian Canavera Herrera, Senior Sustainability Engineer, Foster + Partners; credit: Foster + Partners