Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, engineers have made significant progress in delivering a range of key solutions and services to the world's growing public communities. Until the second half of the 20th century, however, engineers rarely considered broader environmental impacts, in part because of a lack of scientific understanding of the world's natural systems and their limited resilience.

With the increase of scientific knowledge, the field of environmental science emerged, and professional knowledge gained a better understanding of the impact of environmental development. We strive to integrate key parts of this new knowledge into engineering disciplines. The most obvious action, however, is the development of a new discipline, in the form of "environmental engineering", focusing on the interaction of engineering and environmental issues. As the breadth and complexity of environmental challenges grows, the development of environmental engineering techniques over the past two decades has become increasingly important.

However, the challenge is too great, and for environmental engineers, the response time to the environmental problems of the entire profession is too short. Environmental engineering is not a substitute for sustainable engineering. On the contrary, key knowledge and skills of environmental science, previously taught only in environmental engineering, must be quickly and effectively integrated into all engineering disciplines. At the same time, the discipline of environmental engineering itself must continue to develop into advanced, specialized fields, such as modeling, monitoring, impact assessment, pollution control, assessment and collaborative design.