Engineering The Future: The Only Constant Is Change
I remember hearing “the only constant is change” when I was in college, and it caused me to think about how I could make myself ready for evolving change. I couldn’t have imagined in the 1980s just how quickly the world would change in my lifetime—and how important being able to be flexible and pivot would be in my professional life.
In the 1990s, I served on a school district committee that was charged with taking the recently adopted district vision statement and create educational goals:
We will give our students the vision to reach for the stars, the skills and fortitude to climb the ladder, and the wisdom to appreciate the beauty of
the journey.
That poetic vision still inspires me. The committee had 15 people serving on it, and I was the only individual who had no direct connection to education at any level. We went around the table, and each individual had to answer the question: “What do we need to teach our current kindergarten students through to their high school graduation to make them successful adults?”
Everyone had specific curriculum ideas. I was the second to last to give my opinion. I stated that I had no idea what exactly we would need to teach, given the accelerating speed of change. I proposed providing them with a strong foundation in math, science, language arts, social studies, arts and music—and supplementing that with teaching skills to not only adapt to change, but to embrace it. The room went into a silent pause, as I had called everyone out with their application of past pedagogical theories and applying them to the future. I was asking them to reinvent the future.
Help Make a Better Future
As I look at my career, I’ve always been forward-looking. Now the task is taking on a more somber tone, as we’re seeing ever-increasing billion-dollar disasters that take hundreds and thousands of human lives and displace tens and hundreds of thousands of people. It’s becoming the new normal. We see the impacts and suffering almost daily on the news, and we’re becoming numb to it.
That’s simply unacceptable. As engineers, a basic tenet of our code of ethics is to uphold public health and safety. We need to lead the implementation of societal changes. If we’re to be successful, we will need to partner with two sectors largely unfamiliar to us: the finance and insurance sectors.
We can’t afford to replace our aging infrastructure in kind. With the average age of more than 50 years old, it was designed to meet challenges that now are outdated. We need to use our future world vision and prospective modeling to build resilient infrastructure. Infrastructure that delivers through financial, design and functional lives, in that order.
The Bond Market
In 2025, one of three American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) federal policy priorities for Congress included tax exemption for municipal bonds. Since as much as 70 percent of projects in the United States—from major transportation to local school additions—use tax-exempt municipal bonds, the loss of tax exemption would further escalate costs. We were successful in keeping that exemption for 2025, but we will continue to monitor. That effort brought ASCE closer to the municipal bond financial sector.
Less than a decade ago, most municipal bonds had 10- to 15-year maturities. Now it’s common to see 30-, 40-, 50- or even 100-year maturities. That means our financing partners, who previously were not concerned with operations and maintenance or resilience, now understand that their risks are increasing. The financial community is starting to understand the need to work with civil engineers. ASCE is convening its second Finance Summit in spring 2026—stay tuned for details. This is the continuation of a process to engage critical partners in infrastructure delivery. We’re also engaging with the insurance industry.
As I discussed earlier in 2025, the “ASCE Bridging the Gap” report identifies a $3.7 billion funding gap in all 18 categories of our infrastructure that are assessed in the “2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.” That number is only to get us to a state of good repair. All the “cool and neat” futuristic infrastructure is above that number, so we need to leverage all financial tools to meet these growing needs.
On a personal note, I’m transitioning to a part-time role as executive advisor on U.S. Infrastructure for GHD, and I’m the new interim executive director of ASCE. I’m also starting as the Samual P. Capen professor of engineering management at the State University of New York
at Buffalo. Transitioning to “walk
the talk.”
Please enjoy family and friend time during this holiday season so you can recharge those batteries. Happy Holidays!
About Maria Lehman
Maria Lehman, P.E., F.ASCE, ENV SP, is U.S. Infrastructure Lead for GHD. She is the past president of the ASCE and currently serves as as a member of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council; email: Maria.Lehman@ghd.com.
