Climate change and re-engineering the future: the Failure Modes of Engineering (FeME) approach

Written by Dr Encarni Medina-Lopez (School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, and Lead of the FeME project) and Dr Kirsty Pringle (Software Sustainability Institute, EPCC, and FeME Specialist), on behalf of the FeME team
In engineering, it’s essential to consider not just how a process works, but also how it might fail. Engineers do this by identifying failure modes—specific ways in which a design might fail to perform its intended function—and developing strategies to prevent or mitigate them. In this exciting new project, our interdisciplinary team will collaborate with the international research community and industry to identify and address the failure modes of the present engineering discipline, in order to understand how to mitigate the urgent challenges that the climate crisis is bringing in a more fair and equitable way.
“Climate change is the greatest challenge we face, but as an engineer, I know that technical solutions alone won’t solve the problems ahead”
– Dr Encarni Medina-Lopez (Lead of the FeME project)
Climate change has a disproportionate impact on women, children and underrepresented communities (such as people living in the Global South, indigenous communities, or people from impoverished backgrounds): when natural disasters strike, they suffer more due to biases in decision making, limited access to resources, and lack of information. Our new Failure Modes of Engineering (FeME) project focuses on engineering solutions for climate change and biodiversity loss, and their impact on women, children and underrepresented communities. More than that, our project aims to empower them as crucial agents for the future engineering that we need.
The core team of this proposal is composed by academics at the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow and Heriot-Watt University. Our strength lies in the genuinely interdisciplinary nature of our team, enabling us to analyse this complex problem from diverse and complementary perspectives. Spanning different career stages and expertise in science, engineering, systems, education, and psychology, we all share a focus on climate change-related topics, and when we saw the TERC report, we knew this was the right mechanism to reach our goal.
To develop the proposal, we held two co-creation workshops with colleagues in academia, industry, NGOs and government. The common topic in our conversation was, unsurprisingly, that we are failing to tackle climate change.
Then a colleague asked “How do engineers speak about failure?” and that was our lightbulb moment.
– Victoria Darbyshire (Edinburgh Innovations, FeME team)
And so the concept of failure modes entered the room. To frame such a difficult problem, we used this classic systems engineering approach, typically used to identify potential failures in a design, so we could analyse the ways in which contemporary engineering approaches lack preparation to face the challenges posed by climate change. This is important because it allows us to shift the focus from understanding how the complex system between engineering, nature and society works, to identifying and mitigating what might prevent the system from working.
Our proposal is built on a soft systems framework that includes storytelling and participatory approaches. These are feminist techniques widely used in social sciences, and is a core aspect of our project: we want to explore how social sciences can be used as an integral part of engineering research.
Through this process, we identified six failure modes, which serve as the foundation for organising our proposal into six key characteristics essential for the “Future Engineering” we aim to nurture through our network:
1. Diverse Engineering that is more inclusive through education;
2. Inspired Engineering that provides socially acceptable solutions;
3. Connected Engineering that provides globally accessible data to solve global issues;
4. Inclusive Engineering that supports underrepresented groups;
5. Interdisciplinary Engineering that happens at a global scale; and
6. Agile Engineering that adapts to our resources in a threatening climate.
As a result, we have 25 activities within 11 thematic areas that include training, seed funding, networking and dissemination, award programs, or design challenges that will bring engineers from the Global North and the Global South together. We have reserved a portion of our budget as a “caring pot” to give opportunities to those that usually are limited due to caring commitments. Moreover, almost half of our funding is flexible funding so we can adapt to the needs of the communities, and the progress of the sector. A large percentage of the activities cut across more than one failure mode, and we are using education as a common thread.
“Engineering needs to be relevant for all”
– Prof. Caroline Gauchotte-Lindsay (Co-lead of the FeME project)
We believe we bring a unique perspective on the future of engineering. Engineering needs to be relevant for all, embedding societies, social justice and environmental stewardship at the core. Even more so we believe in people. We want to create a cross sector, cross background community with a new vision and tools to think up solutions to climate change. Our legacy will be a new way to do truly interdisciplinary research, and a community that will keep on growing beyond the network for real transformational changes.
The FeME project is funded by EPSRC through its Network Plus: Tomorrow’s Engineering Research Challenges initiative with £2.2 million over 3 years (2025 – 2028).
Get in touch: feme@ed.ac.uk