AgroParisTech and ESTP Announce the Creation of an “Environmental Civil Engineering” Teaching and Research Chair

As the construction sector seeks to reinvent itself in response to the consequences of climate change and waning biodiversity, this alliance will leverage its shared vision to help drive progress in scientific, technical, and practical expertise relating to environmental engineering. By accelerating the development of skills in this sector, this chair aims to make it easier to integrate biodiversity and the natural environment into future construction and development projects.

In fostering scientific and technological advances in the management and sharing of resources, the partners supporting the chair are aiming to help structure a sector that sees itself as a bridge between the worlds of environmental engineering and civil engineering, with the following main focal points:

• Integrating environmental issues in civil engineering processes that must also address a number of challenges;
• Designing future developments in ways that respect how ecosystems work and make economic use of the land;
• Restoring ecosystems and degraded soils and removing installations that have become obsolete, including by using nature-based solutions, in order to help regions adapt to the effects of climate change;
• Protecting and safeguarding biodiversity and the multitude of ecosystem services it enables.

Environmental Civil Engineering: Building in Sync with the Environment

Environmental engineering aims to maintain, restore, or reestablish ecosystems and their functions in a number of cases and situations, some of which fall under the umbrella of the French government’s Avoid, Reduce, Offset (ERC) initiative. This approach aims to encourage the ecosystem resilience, improve environmental processes, and preserve biodiversity. Examples include:

• Restoring environments and of their biodiversity;
• Bringing soils back to their natural state;
• Restoring damaged waterways to improve the quality of water and reduce the risk of flooding;
• Putting ecosystems at the heart of development projects through the “Avoid, Reduce, Offset” approach.

In response to the challenges posed by environmental engineering and the preservation of biodiversity in urban areas, VINCI Construction has created Equo Vivo, a brand dedicated entirely to environmentally friendly development projects, and uses Biodi(V)strict, an Urbalia engineering tool designed in collaboration with the VINCI ParisTech environment research lab. In response to the need to make the environment an integral part of the design of urban projects, Eiffage has developed the EcoAsis® urban cool island concept, which restores the permeability and vegetation of urban soils.

Civil engineering, on the other hand, is about the art of construction. It aims to construct buildings that fulfill a precise function for the human beings that occupy them. Although civil engineering and environmental engineering may long have been judged to be incompatible, the time has come to connect them by having professionals from both sides work together. This will encourage a systemic approach, one that takes all the components of the ecosystem into account, be it for land-use planning or for other development projects. It entails incorporating environmental concerns directly into the primary intended function (transport, housing, etc.) of the construction project, from the design phase of the development project onwards.

A Chair to Benefit Society and the Needs of the Industry

In a context in which the primary cause of the decline in biodiversity (as identified in the 2019 IPBES report) is changes in the use of land and oceans, overall awareness needs to be raised. The French Climate and Resilience Act has set a “Zero Net Artificialization” target for 2050, and the European Union is currently preparing a “Restoration Law,” which will make it compulsory for member states to work on the restoration of natural environments between now and 2050.

However, by working for and with living organisms, environmental civil engineering relies on the specific skill sets of all the people working in this field, particularly during the design and construction phases. Indeed, project management is key to ensuring that project design, getting construction completed properly, and achieving the environmental targets that have been set all go hand in hand. And yet this area is plagued by a clear shortage of crucial skills—the result of a lack of specialized initial education programs and a shared vision in this field.

Against this backdrop, ESTP and AgroParisTech, two major schools in the areas of construction engineering and life and environmental sciences—both at the forefront of the ecological transition—have joined forces with UPGE to create a chair dedicated to environmental engineering for a four-year period, in partnership with VINCI Construction and the Eiffage group.

The work of this chair will center on three main dimensions:

• Teaching, with the creation of educational resources dedicated to environmental engineering topics (courses, educational projects, etc.);
• Research and innovation, with the introduction and funding of collaborative research programs and theses to fulfill the needs of the sector (biodiversity, the water cycle, living areas, soil functions, materials, environmentally friendly design, environmentally efficient resource use, carbon neutrality, heat islands);
• Promoting the sector’s professions and products to boost its appeal through shared marketing campaigns and events, demos, or innovative equipment for teaching or applied research.