A new £15million fund has been made available to help address the world’s “most critical” engineering challenges, including offshore decommissioning.
The Royal Academy of Engineering has entered a partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation to allocate the funding over five years.
It will focus on three areas; developing skills globally where they are most needed, safer complex industrial engineering systems and improved safety in decommissioning.
The latter will include the shutdown of offshore structures.
The academy is hoping that engineering companies from around the UK and more widely will identify areas with the greatest need.
The partnership may result in new standards, or codes of conduct, or even new approaches to engineering education, and will support programmes that have the most impact upon engineering practice globally.
It is hoped the funding can be used to develop global research collaborations to show best practice.
President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Dame Ann Dowling said: “Our world increasingly relies on complex interconnected systems and our safety is at risk when localised issues result in wider, often unanticipated consequences.
“This global partnership seeks to make these complex systems safer. It will also help to build engineering capacity and skills to address these challenges, particularly in developing economies, and will result in improved and safer through-life design and disposal of engineering systems, from hazardous waste to ships and offshore structures.”
Richard Clegg, CEO of Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said: “The first programmes recognise that there are new and emerging safety challenges, which we can make a distinctive contribution towards addressing.
“This will be achieved via better understanding of complex engineered systems and the safer decommissioning of infrastructures, products and services.
“We also see that there are skills challenges that limit the capability of developing economies to select, licence and operate new critical infrastructure.”
