Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Environmental Engineering has grown rapidly over the past few decades, burgeoning to meet the stresses of an ever-growing population on a planet with finite resources. The discipline fosters a multidisciplinary knowledge base with creative thinking to understand the problems caused by humans on the natural environment and then develop appropriate and sustainable solutions.
This talk by Prof. Laurence Gill, highlights the role that environmental engineers play in society in meeting contemporary challenges, covering areas of using sunlight to treat water, the impact of pollution from septic tanks on the environment, the complex underground nature of how water moves through karst cave systems and the role that wetlands play in carbon capture and hydrology and approaches that are being taken to retire these unique ecosystems. The talk shows how the research has fed through and led to real innovative solutions for society, either in terms of technology development or policy.

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