With barely time to draw breath after returning from the bi-lateral exchange visit to South Korea in early September, the Academy’s international partnerships team headed into what is the highlight of the year for those in the engineering community involved in international multilateral engagement—the Euro-CASE and CAETS conferences, held this year in Madrid and Zagreb respectively.
Background to the Academy’s multilateral work
The Academy’s long-standing and active involvement in CAETS (the Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences) and Euro-CASE (the European Council of Academies of Applied Sciences, Technologies, and Engineering) has been key to its international profile and work to strengthen global engineering leadership.
Euro-CASE represents academies from 23 European nations and is an independent non-profit organisation that acts as a permanent forum for exchange and consultation between European institutions, industry and research.
CAETS is an independent nonpolitical, non-governmental, international organisation comprising of national engineering and technology academies from 31 countries. As with Euro-CASE, it offers a means by which the Academy can explore opportunities to collaborate with other countries to address critical engineering and technological challenges. At present, the Academy chairs two of the five CAETS working groups on UN Sustainable Development Goals and on Diversity and Inclusion
The crucial role of multilateral networks during Covid
The importance of these established multilateral networks was demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic when the Academy convened a series of online roundtables to share international engineering interventions on PPE, tracking and infection management.
These roundtables helped engineers around the world to address the challenges being faced in their own countries and provided groundwork for the Academy—through its Engineering X programme— to publish a Global review of the engineering response to COVID-19, outlining the broad and varied role played by engineers and engineering during the pandemic. The review highlights case studies of successes and failures and develops key lessons and recommendations to improve future pandemic preparedness and response to help ensure engineers play their key role in contributing to future public health emergencies.
Anticipating this year’s CAETS conference
Both the CAETS and Euro-CASE annual conferences serve as international platforms for knowledge exchange, discussions, and collaboration on issues at the forefront of engineering and technology.
I took over as chair of the Academy’s International Committee in June 2022 and am greatly looking forward to leading the Academy’s delegation to CAETS 2023, hosted by the Croatian Academy of Engineering on 9-11 October in Zagreb. It’s hard to overstate how useful this kind of forum is for networking and the opportunities it offers for learning from each other, for collaboration and to forge new partnerships around the world.
The conference theme is e-mobility, including electrification of transport and integration with energy systems, battery technology, hydrogen fuel cells, and autonomous vehicles. The Academy’s expert delegation includes Tony Harper FREng, Industrial Strategy Challenge Director of the Faraday Battery Challenge, and members of Academy staff. The topics include those the Academy has focused on over the years and on which it continues to provide thought leadership and to create international alliances to support sustainability. Working with the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC), as part of its programme on climate and sustainability policy, the Academy has active projects to support a delivery plan for a decarbonised electricity system, and also to produce a series of written briefings on the theme of materials and net zero with the first of these, expected early next year on how we can achieve demand reduction in the critical raw materials that are needed for the low-carbon technologies we will need to achieve net zero.
I must confess that it is a relief that this year our UK delegation will be meeting with colleagues from Europe and around the world with the matter of the UK’s association to Horizon Europe finally resolved. Among other things, we shall be focusing on furthering discussions with key partners in advanced economies to explore the delivery of a series of thought leadership workshops under the government's new International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF). There are exciting opportunities to explore and I’m hopeful and looking forward to seeing what may transpire from the Academy’s important and growing multilateral partnerships.