The WFEO Code of Environmental Ethics for Engineers

The WFEO Committee on Engineering and Environment, with a strong and clear belief that mankind's enjoyment and permanence on this planet will depend on the care and protection provided to the environment, states the following principles:

To all engineers

When you develop any professional activity:

1. Try with the best of your ability, courage, enthusiasm and dedication to obtain a superior technical achievement, which will contribute to and promote a healthy and agreeable surrounding for all, in open spaces as well as indoors.

2. Strive to accomplish the beneficial objectives of your work with the lowest possible consumption of raw materials and energy and the lowest production of wastes and any kind of pollution.

3. Discuss in particular the consequence of your proposals and actions, direct or indirect, immediate or long term, upon social equity and the local system of values, and upon the health of people.

4. Study thoroughly the environment that will be affected, assess the impacts that might arise in the state, dynamics and aesthetics of the ecosystems involved, urbanised or natural, as well as in the pertinent socio- economic systems, and select the best alternative for an environmentally sound and sustainable development.

5. Promote a clear understanding of the actions required to restore and, if possible, to improve the environment that may be disturbed, and include them in your proposals.

6. Reject any kind of commitment that involves unfair damage to human surroundings and nature, and negotiate the best possible social and political solution.

7. Be aware that the principles of ecosystemic interdependence, diversity maintenance, resource recovery and interrelational harmony form the bases of our continued existence and that each of those bases poses a threshold of sustainability that should not be exceeded.

Always remember that war, greed, misery and ignorance, plus natural disaster and human-induced pollution and destruction of resources, are the main causes of the progressive impairment of the environment and that you, as an active member of the engineering profession, deeply involved in the promotion of development,must use your talent, knowledge and imagination to assist society in removing those evils and improving the quality of life for all people.

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http://www.hk.super.net/~hkie_env/coe.htm