As construction enters its third decade of the 21st century, the events and changes of the last 10 years within the industry and in the world it serves have been hugely dramatic—generating challenges yet to confront or understand, but also new opportunities for next-generation professionals to provide critically needed innovation in design and construction practice, technology and business.

The growing impacts and implications of climate change over the past 10 years have been a big story for ENR and its global audience, as new studies show that the window to take action to cut harmful emissions and address high-risk areas now is only a decade away.

“If nations aren’t in lockstep to make emissions cuts now, there is little chance to stay within the warming target,” said veteran engineer and sustainability advocate Bill Wallace in a 2018 ENR editorial. “The report says that, at 1.5° C and below (we’re now at 0.8° C), climate-change mitigation and adaptation can be managed. Above that, conditions get really dicey, and fixes are really expensive."

Sea-level rise in particular has created new vulnerabilities for populations centers on the costs and near other flood-prone water bodies. PHOTO BY EMILY MICHOT/MIAMI HERALD VIA AP

Sea-level rise in particular has created new vulnerabilities for population centers on coasts and near other flood-prone water bodies that engineers and construction teams have addressed through hardened infrastructure and other innovation.

"Many cities are still trying to get a handle on the complex, interrelated problems. But others, such as Miami Beach, have started aggressive, multimillion-dollar programs to raise roads and improve drainage," a 2017 ENR special report pointed out. "Engineers are rethinking their practice, coming up with innovative, adaptive designs that will prevent overbuilding in the short term."

As such, the decade witnessed a boom in sustainability as an accepted and desired building approach by clients and as a new and growing service offering and market niche for industry firms.

Sustainability certification programs, which only included LEED for buildings in 2010, have exploded to include specialized standards, such as WELL Building, ParkSmart, Fitwel and Living Building Challenge for healthy buildings, and Envision for infrastructure.

Revenue levels for firms offering sustainability expertise boomed as well over the decade, with the Top 100 Green Design Firms generating $6.77 billion in 2018 design revenue, up 9% from the previous year, and Top 100 Green Contractors reporting $68.61 billion in 2018, up 10.5% from 2017.

Even with new resilience measures adopted since Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast in 2005, climate-change related events still developed into damaging catastrophes during the decade—from Superstorm Sandy slamming low-lying coastal areas of the East Coast in 2012 to back-to-back damaging 2017 hurricanes Maria in the Caribbean and Harvey in Texas and the explosively deadly wildfires in California and more recently, in Australia, which have government and industry experts enacting and pondering even more extensive upgrades and building restrictions, hardening measures and resilience programs for the future.

Developers continued to push new energy projects but a growing number of public sector and environmentalist opponents of fossil-fuel energy construction also mounted new efforts through legislation, the ballot box and the courts to restrict or halt projects.

New concerns spawned a huge spurt in clean energy construction in the decade—from solar, wind and other renewables—that has propelled a new industry niche, as the federal government under President Barack Obama, and more recently states and localities, have mandated ambitious new goals and requirements to be included in the U.S. energy mix.

That ground-level impetus will continue in the next decade, even with unclear support, and what some see as strong opposition, from the Donald Trump administration.

Even so, global clean energy growth has been propelled in the past decade, as other nations have embraced the approach for economic as well as environmental reasons. Europe and China, for example, vastly expanded regional and national commitment to offshore wind energy, with the latter set to shortly become the world's largest market.

Upscaled

The infrastructure demands of growing populations, as well as the scale of legacy environmental problems and need for better construction efficiencies have scaled up energy and other sector projects over the decade, with "gigaproject" emerging as a new industry buzzword. The last ten years saw construction of a number of record transportation projects, including the new $5-billion Panama Canal, rail and transit upgrades in the U.K. and skyline-altering mega-crossings in New York in a push by the state's politically ambitious governor, Andrew Cuomo (D), not seen since the 1930s.

The last ten years saw construction of a number of record transportation projects, including a new $5-billion Panama Canal. Photo: Courtesy of the Panama Canal Authority

Across the country, the Pacific Northwest also eyes an aggressive infrastructure program ahead.

But rising costs and politics have become bigger factors, as in California's now truncated push for high speed rail and the effort to bring light rail to car-centric Honolulu.

Projects to clean up legacy environmental waste showed some decade progress, such as at the U.S. Energy Dept.'s 560-sq-mile Hanford nuclear waste site in Washington state, where a long-gestating $17-billion production plant being built to finally get rid of millions of gallons of chemical and radioactive wastes stored underground since World War II, showed some promise as testing got closer in 2019 of the site's new vitrification plant, which will turn wastes to glass and is mandated to start up in 2023. But with its success not clear and with other site waste cleanup challenges, Hanford remains an environmental problem.

There were also key changes in handling wastes amassing at private nuclear power plants, with new technologies and business approaches offered by industry firms aimed at cutting years, or even decades, off time spans to decommission sites no longer economical in a more competitive energy marketplace since 2010.

As the decade brought new challenges to megaproject building, it also unveiled an evolution in project delivery, with key strides outlined by ENR in broadened use of innovative approaches such as integrated project delivery (IPD), and public-private partnerships (P3s), although not always smoothly with project risk balance growing as a bigger business management issue for contractors and owners, that remains ongoing heading into the new decade. 

Design-build continued to grow as a preferred project delivery alternative, with 38 states passing enabling legislation by 2019, according to the Design-Build Institute of America.

Lessons Learned?

The push for efficiency, however, still did not forestall project calamities during the decade, whether by environmental causes or human error, which ranged from the tsunami-generated damage to Japan's poorly located Fukushima nuclear reactor in 2011 to to the epic 2018 collapse of what was supposed to be an iconic pedestrian bridge in Florida that instead killed eight motorists and has its construction team participants still embroiled in litigation. ENR compiled its first-ever list of the worst global projects in 2014.

Crane collapses on large urban projects, most recently in New York City, Seattle, Dallas and New Orleans, with worker and civilian casualties, also added to project complexities during the decade.