Environmental Engineering
Flood defences, remediation and habitat works — engineering with the environment as the client.
Environmental engineering is civils in service of the landscape. The plant is familiar — excavators, piling rigs, dumpers — and the earthworks, dewatering and drainage methods are the shared ones, linked below. What is different is the success criterion: measured in water levels, flood return periods and species counts as much as in cubic metres poured.
The three guides in this sector cover flood defences construction — walls, embankments and barriers that must work on the worst day, not the average one; river engineering works, training and restoring watercourses while they carry on flowing past the workfront; and habitat creation and mitigation, where the ecology is the deliverable and the construction is just how you get there.
What does Environmental Engineering cover?
Process guides in Environmental Engineering
- Flood Defence Construction — Walls, embankments, gates and pumping stations that keep the water on the right side of the line — built beside live watercourses under consent from the Environment Agency or the lead local flood authority, with a flood plan in your back pocket.
- River Engineering & Watercourse Works — Reshaping and armouring watercourses — weirs and fish passes, re-sectioned channels, gabion and riprap banks — much of it built in or over live water behind temporary dams and overpumping, inside a consented season window.
- Habitat Creation & Environmental Mitigation — The licensed, season-bound work of moving protected species out of harm's way and building them somewhere better — newt fences and receptor ponds, artificial badger setts, bat lofts, translocated turf — delivered under an ecological clerk of works and thirty years of promised management.
Shared methods used in Environmental Engineering
- Corridor Access & Enabling Works
- Survey Control & Ground Investigation
- Bulk Earthworks — Cuttings & Embankments
- Earthworks & Excavation
- Dewatering & Groundwater Control
- Drainage & Utility Corridors
- Piling & Deep Foundations
- External Works & Landscaping
Part of the Environmental & Land Development group.