Shoal presents at the Climate Smart Engineering Conference 2023
Systems Engineer, Thomas Jacquier, presented at Engineers Australia’s Climate Smart Engineering Conference in Melbourne today. The conference brings together 19 colleges and technical societies from Engineers Australia to share knowledge and discuss solutions to address climate change, responding to extreme events, biodiversity loss, boosting the circular economy and upholding the principles of sustainable practices in engineering.
Thomas’s presentation, ‘A systems approach to design for resilience’, shares recommendations on how to design for resilience from the unforeseen and compounding disruptions resulting from extreme and black swan events. His focus is on critical infrastructure, introducing a framework to diagnose points of intervention to increase community resilience and provide rigorous capability design, ensuring infrastructure projects meet current and future community needs. From his research, Thomas found that taking a systematic approach early in the project life cycle to understand interdependencies and the operating context, can provide insight into the effects of disruptions before they occur, helping to manage risks.
“We are very proud to have engineers that contribute to world-leading views and solutions to fight against climate change,” says Shaun Wilson, CEO of Shoal Group.
“As a systems thinker and leader of our Environmental Sustainability Working Group, Thomas’s professional expertise in systems engineering provides a lens by which to investigate and offer solutions to the climate crisis.”
At Shoal, Thomas has worked across rail infrastructure and defence sectors applying systems engineering expertise to solve complex problems. He has experience with high fidelity modelling and simulation, has led requirements elicitation workshops with senior project stakeholders, managed requirements through design review gates to ensure traceability, and supported the development of a model-based framework for asset management. He is Shoal’s Environment Officer, championing initiatives to improve Shoal’s sustainability, reduce emissions and increase environmental awareness. Leading with the philosophy ‘think globally, act locally’, Thomas has encouraged staff to get involved in local communities, with initiatives this year including a Systems thinking and volunteering day with The Forktree Project, a re-wilding initiative in South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula.
Read the presentation: Systems Approach to Design for Resilience – Climate Smart Engineering 2023
This work continues the involvement of Shoal in addressing resilience at the national level – initially through our further research and work into designing for resilience, and followed by our article series of Reframing Our Future, and subsequently in submissions to various Government inquiries.
Read about designing for resilience:
- Conceptual design for resilience – July 2022
- Employing a Model-Based Conceptual Design Approach to Design for Resilience – July 2021
- Victorian Ports System: White Paper – July 2020
- Post COVID Vision for Australia – May 2020
Read Reframing Our Future series:
- Reframing our future – May 2020
- Understanding Resilience in Systems – May 2020
- National Resilience and the Cynefin Framework – May 2020
- Resilience – From Policy to Implementation – June 2020
- Understanding Decision Frameworks – June 2020
- Realising a National Resilience Framework – July 2020
- Protecting Critical Infrastructure and Systems of national Significance – December 2020
Read Shoal’s submissions to Government inquiries:
- Submission to the inquiry into the performance of the Department of Defence in supporting the capability and capacity of Australia’s defence industry – August 2023
- Submission to ‘A Migration System for Australia’s Future’ – December 2022
- Submission to the Defence Strategic Review – December 2022
- Submission to the inquiry into development Australia’s space industry – January 2021
- Submission to the Select Committee on COVID-19 – May 2020.
