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Protecting The Big Easy: This Year’s Mardi Gras Showed Again How Infrastructure And Digital Twins Can Help Keep New Orleans Safe and Dry

New Orleans is home to awe-inspiring music, food and street parties. But let’s not forget equally awe-inspiring infrastructure, which keeps the Big Easy dry. That was evident in early March when New Orleans entered “Deep Gras,” the boisterous coda to months of revelry culminating in Fat Tuesday, the end of the Mardi Gras season. Sitting on land near and below sea level and surrounded by water, the party could go on thanks to a ring of levees, floodgates, pump stations, spillways and other infrastructure. Many of these structures were built or reinforced after the catastrophic flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, including the city’s new “Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System,” a 130-mile-long flood wall completed in 2022. Dubbed as the “great wall of New Orleans,” the concrete and steel wall is the largest project in U.S. Army Corps history. “We have the most robust and complex infrastructure here in Louisiana, especially around the city of New Orleans,” says Joey Cocco, president and CEO of the Louisiana engineering firm Forte & Tablada. “The city started in the highest point here, the French Quarter, and it grew out from there. The levees and other infrastructure form a system that

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Smart Heat: A Digital Twin Helps a College Town Move Toward Carbon Neutrality. Are big cities next?

Ithaca is a picturesque town in upstate New York famous for its waterfalls and gorges, and the world-renowned Cornell University. The area has long been hailed as a beacon of progress. Cornell’s students and scientists, for example, helped discover that water once flowed on Mars, built the first fully functioning synthetic human ear, and learned from famed astronomer Carl Sagan. Now, Ithaca and its 32,000 residents have big plans to extend their innovative legacy by leading in urban decarbonization. The city has decided to replace its fossil fuel-burning infrastructure, like boilers and stoves, with electric-powered heat pumps and induction cookers. The work is planned for all of the city’s 5,500 buildings, with the goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2030. The plan is to reach 100% electrification as efficiently and economically as possible—and at the center of the project is a digital twin. The digital urban building energy model was developed by researchers from Cornell’s Environmental System Lab and the Rocky Mountain Institute. Part of the work is sponsored by Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company and a leader in digital twins and artificial intelligence (AI) for infrastructure. Bentley is also helping share lessons learned from the project with

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From Railways to Recognition: A First-Timer’s Step-By-Step Guide to Winning Bentley’s Going Digital Awards

Railways and the steam engine. Few inventions better symbolize England’s role as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. The country’s first railroad opened in 1825, using Robert Stephenson’s steam locomotive, the Locomotion No. 1, along the 25-mile (40-kilometer) Stockton and Darlington Railroad. The reign of Queen Victoria started a dozen years later and saw a massive expansion of England’s rail networks. By 1870, the kingdom had 16,000 miles of track, and by the queen’s death in 1901, 1.1 billion passengers had travelled by train. Thousands of miles of these tracks are still in use today, and many bridges, tunnels, and stations have become protected parts of the U.K.’s industrial and engineering heritage. The infrastructure stands as a testament to the ingenuity of its builders and to the engineers who have modernized the tracks and kept them up to date, ensuring they can continue to carry passengers and freight for generations to come. “It’s an engineering challenge,” says one of these engineers, Elliott Watson. Watson leads engineering services at SPL Powerlines, the leading U.K. firm specializing in railroad electrification. Over the last few years, Watson and his team have helped electrify 278 miles (447 kilometers) of tracks along the Midland Main

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Cutting Carbon: Bentley’s New Carbon Analysis Capabilities Are Helping Engineers Tackle Infrastructure’s Environmental Impact

When the U.S. began building the Federal Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s , sustainability wasn’t a big topic of conversation. Few engineers and policymakers thought about the long-term environmental impact of shifting away from railroads and the growing reliance on oil as personal vehicles became the norm. The carbon footprint of such a massive transportation network? Hardly anyone gave it a second thought. Today, the focus has shifted. “Carbon is now taking a more central role in how we design and deliver projects,” says Kelvin Saldanha, a highway engineer and associate director at WSP, one of the world’s leading civil engineering firms. He notes that even 15 years ago, engineers rarely considered a project’s carbon emissions. Learn more about Carbon Analysis The infrastructure sector — which includes everything from roads and railways to wind farms and tunnels — now accounts for roughly 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions, Saldanha says. As the world grapples with the effects of climate change, the sector is rethinking how to reduce its carbon footprint while building the future. Bringing carbon emissions into the equation is an important step. But firms like WSP have struggled with compiling carbon data for projects because of

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Give Me Shelter: These Digital Technologies Are Helping the World’s Infrastructure Prepare for the Changing Climate

In early May, you could hear a pin drop in Bangladesh’s classrooms and playgrounds, as the country’s schools and colleges closed in response to a ferocious heatwave. But there was no respite for rickshaw driver Mohammed Shameem, who had no choice but to ply his trade in the roasting, congested streets of Dhaka. “It is too hard to work under the sun during a brutal heatwave,” he told Reuters. Meanwhile, over in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, citizens were launching a rescue operation with boats and jet skis to save their neighbors from the city’s most devastating floods since 1941. Marcelo Moreira Ferreira only sought shelter and abandoned the house his father built and where he had lived his whole life when the muddy waters of the Guiaba Lake reached his chest, The Guardian wrote. Although Shameen and Ferreira live on opposite sides of the world, their plight is an urgent reminder that climate action needs to remain two-pronged: Mitigation and adaptation. We must keep reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the root cause of global warming. But we must also make our towns and cities more resilient. This includes strengthening roads, dams, bridges, and power grids to withstand extreme weather, and also

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COP28: A Pivotal Moment for Both Global Climate Action & Infrastructure

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) concluded last month after 14 days of negotiations. While opinions on its success may vary, I view the outcomes of COP28 as a historic and significant stride towards achieving net zero by 2050. Noteworthy progress was made during COP28’s pre-scheduled agenda, including the decision to involve cities at the negotiating table to ensure climate action reaches those responsible for implementing it locally, as well as agreements about how the globe can best adapt to the impacts of climate change (which I expect to cover in a future post). Most importantly, a milestone Global Stocktake agreement was reached after climate talks were forced into overtime to bridge internal divisions about how to deal with fossil fuels. This agreement stipulates a just and orderly transition away from fossil fuels and sets a new specific carbon reduction target: tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 to help close the energy transition gap and get on a 1.5°C pathway. Supplemented by other governmental commitments linked to public construction projects, this agreement will have profound implications for how infrastructure is designed, built, and operated. Why such profound implications? Because our current infrastructure relies heavily on fossil fuels.

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Bentley’s Net-Zero Resolution

This article was originally published on February 8, 2023. Updates reflect SBTi’s approval of our near-term net-zero targets.   The challenges of the past few years, from a global pandemic to climate disasters, have given us many opportunities to reflect on what type of world generations after us will inherit. As we rang in a new year, we resolved to reduce our carbon footprint. As with any resolution, it was the result of much introspection. Empowering our users to create more sustainable and resilient infrastructure through the use of our software and services has been a long-standing focus of ours at Bentley. We refer to this impact as our environmental “handprint” and while this focus is unwavering, we are also keenly aware of our responsibility to reduce our own carbon footprint. Once we set out to lower our carbon footprint, we wanted to ensure we were setting clear, measurable, and attainable targets, and doing so transparently. To do this we engaged with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the world’s leading coalition for setting corporate emission reduction targets in line with climate science. Their Net-Zero Standard is the benchmark against which organizations demonstrate strong management of their climate strategy, and why

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Accelerating Decarbonization with iTwin Experience Embodied Carbon Assessment

Kaustubh Page, Bentley’s Director of iTwin Platform Management, also contributed to this post.  The race to cut carbon in half by 2030 is starting to heat up. According to a recent report by the UN’s World Meteorologist Organization, the world is headed for “uncharted territory”, with average global temperatures expected to breach the 1.5C climate threshold at least once by 2027. The agency predicts a warming El Nino, combined with human-induced climate change, will have “far-reaching repercussions for health, food, security, water management and the environment.” With infrastructure responsible for 79% of total greenhouse gas emissions and 88% of all adaptation costs (UNOPS), the world needs rapid and unprecedented transformation to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) and future-proof infrastructure. At the same time, engineering firms are struggling to find talent. There are simply not enough engineers graduating from college to fulfil the growth in project pipelines, particularly for the projects that require extensive knowledge about environmental sustainability. This is compounded by a change in required skill sets and an aging and retiring workforce. In the U.S., more than half of engineering firms are turning down work due to workforce shortages. The infrastructure sector is looking to increase capacity by leveraging

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Addressing Water Scarcity in the Middle East with Technology

The landscape of the Middle East has been one of the biggest challenges in the region, which has brought about challenges like water scarcity. Though organizations across the globe are working relentlessly to tackle this major threat, the efforts need to be accelerated further to meet the United Nation’s Sustainability Goals (SDGs). Climate change has been one of the major reasons for increasing water scarcity, and the rising demand for water along with weak water governance, adds to the severity of this global issue. The deteriorating quality of water services, increasing population, urbanization, rising agricultural demand, and depleting groundwater resources also cause pose challenges in mitigating this issue. Experts project that failure to address these challenges will not only cause social and environmental challenges but has the potential to create huge economic crises that hinders growth, increase vulnerability and even cause compound social and political fragility. In the long run, water scarcity can result in limited supply and increased tariffs, jeopardizing the delivery of reliable and affordable water services. If current trends continue, water demand in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region will rise by 62 percent by 2025, and, to meet the rising demand, regional governments have already increased

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