The Emerging Role of Built Environment Education in Facilitating Resilience to External Impacts through Natural Disasters

Over the past several years, the world has seen a significant number of natural disasters. Managing the impact of such disasters will require ongoing disaster management and improving the resilience of settled areas, including buildings and the infrastructure that serves them. Critical to this process will be the education of built environment professionals such as engineers, construction managers and asset managers; and the systems, including advanced information systems, which support them. Components of such education include not only an understanding of resilience and its management, but also related topics such as sustainability and its management, sound design, an understanding of asset management, and the use of advanced materials. Built environment professionals will also require an understanding of current issues in assessing and managing risk management in planning, design, construction and disaster management, and their role in managing such risk, along with associated tasks such as understanding the life cycle management of such events and using advanced information systems to assist in their decisionmaking process. Current education approaches used in teaching sustainable and resilient design, development and management of the built environment are discussed. Such teaching ranges from technical to postgraduate levels and includes research supervision. The authors further discuss how the emerging role of such education can be enhanced through the consideration of emerging developments such as the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence in this process into the role of the built environment professional. An integrated approach that combines sustainability and resilience teaching, and which is taught across a range of disciplines, is considered a useful approach for undertaking the educational process.