Transition engineering is a trans-disciplinary field that addresses wicked problems while creating opportunities to increase resilience and adaptation through change projects.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ran past the "climate safe" 350 ppm range in the 1990s, and has now exceeded 420ppm, a level that Earth has not known for 800,000 years.
The Transition Town movement provided further inspiration as it showed that there were many groups of people around the world motivated to prepare for peak oil and climate change.
Transition towns and ecovillages demonstrate the need for engineers to build systems that manage un-sustainable risks and provide people with sustainable options.
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed 156 trapped workers, 62 engineers came together to investigate how to make the workplace a safer place to be.
Transition Engineering recognizes that the analytical methods of strategic analysis over a life-cycle time-frame are at odds with most economic analyses that discount values with time.
Published in Nov 2019 by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis The textbook sets out the premise, processes, methods and tools of Transition Engineering.
The book includes the perspective stories that Professor Susan Krumdieck has used for sensemaking around wicked problems of change to downshift fossil fuels.
Professor Krumdieck was awarded Queens New Years Honours in 2021 with New Zealand Order of Merit for her research, teaching and publication of the book.
[19] Transition Engineering, Building a Sustainable Future, Susan Krumdieck (2019) CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton