Geotechnical Engineering for Sustainable Development

Abstract

All forms of development impose an inevitable burden on the natural environment. For sustainable development, this burden must be within the self-resilient limits of the natural environment. However, practical implementation of sustainable development is accompanied by great hardship, as is evident from the lukewarm international efforts in reducing carbon emissions for the prevention of global warming. This is because nature conservation and environmental protection, a major keystone in the concept of sustainable development, contends with powerful opponents such as technological convenience and economic validity in the real world. Thus, sustainable development implies the difficult task of achieving both conservation and advancement to engineers in numerous fields. As geotechnical engineering deals with the earth, it can make a great contribution to efficient sustainable development. Best examples are the development of underground space for the next generation and the development of energy with minimum impact on the natural environment. The boundaries of human life are limited to the physical space on earth and are inevitably based on the ground. Hence, the utilization of underground space has the potential of doubling the available space for human use. In addition, the use of conventional fossil fuels are limited by various technological and economic restrictions, whereas the ground is an area of opportunity that can both supply conventional and non-conventional fossil fuels and reduce damages caused by the use of fossil fuels, mainly CO2.