Engineer A has an obligation to consider potential impacts on public health, safety, and welfare, regardless of whether that is required by applicable law, including changing weather patterns and climate. If Engineer A is reasonably certain that the project will result in adverse impacts to public health, safety, and welfare, and if the Client B denies the requisite evaluation, Engineer A should include the concern regarding potential adverse public health, safety, and welfare impacts in an engineering report for consideration by regulatory agencies and the public.

Professional engineers have a primary ethical obligation to hold paramount the protection of public health, safety, and welfare. That obligation is not bounded by what is required by law, or by regulations, but rather is stated broadly. That obligation leads to not uncommon “gray areas” in practice requiring judgment as to what issues potentially impacting public health, safety, and welfare merit more detailed evaluation and what issues do not. Such judgments increasingly necessitate engineers to have sufficient understanding of related areas of engineering practice and science to determine when more specialized evaluation is needed to assure protection of public health, safety, and welfare. Considering the effects of climate change in engineering planning and design adds substantial complexity to engineering decision-making as engineers consider “going beyond” existing requirements to provide long-term protection of public health, safety, and welfare. For more than a century, engineers have assumed that future climate and weather conditions will be consistent with historical climate and weather data. In recent decades, as climate and weather data are updated, the historical dataset changes as climate and weather patterns continue to change. This necessitates that climate and weather patterns be addressed not as fixed by historical patterns but rather recognized as a “moving target.” In BER Case 07.6, Engineer A was a principal in an environmental engineering firm and had been requested by a developer client to prepare an analysis of a piece of property adjacent to a wetlands area for potential development as a residential condominium. During the firm’s analysis, one of the engineering firm’s biologists reported to Engineer A that, in his opinion, the condominium project could threaten a bird species that inhabited the adjacent protected wetlands area. The bird species was not an “endangered species,” but it was considered a “threatened species” by federal and sta...

Engineer A is a consulting engineer representing Client B, a developer who is proposing to develop a health care facility that requires a significant upgrade to the property’s access road that crosses a tidal saltmarsh. Engineer A’s scope includes design and local permitting of the roadway, including an upgrade of the tidal crossing from a small culvert to a small bridge, increasing its hydraulic capacity. Local development regulations require designing for a 25-year fresh-water storm, and assume that future weather conditions will be consistent with updated historical data. The local development regulations and national design codes and standards have not yet been updated to reflect changing conditions and weather patterns, including effects of sea level rise and changes in precipitation intensities and recurrence intervals effected by on-going climate change. It is Engineer A’s judgment, based on hydraulic evaluation procedures presented at a recent transportation agency conference, that the proposed project may result in some upstream homes becoming uninhabitable a decade or more earlier than would otherwise be the case. Engineer A proposes a complex and costly hydrologic and hydraulic analysis by a specialized subconsultant to predict the extent to which sea level rise and the increased hydraulic capacity of the tidal crossing will result in flood damage to a neighborhood of twenty upstream homes during future high tides and storm surges, anticipating this to be a difficult question to answer in the project’s public hearings. Client B directs Engineer A to proceed without the costly analysis unless and until such an analysis is requested by the applicable regulatory authorities.

Does Engineer A have an ethical obligation to address or evaluate the impacts of a project on public health, safety, and welfare with respect to climate change induced conditions that have not yet occurred? In this set of circumstances, what are Engineer A’s reasonable courses of action with respect to engineering ethics?