COP26, This Is Engineering Day and Tomorrow’s Engineer Week have all shone a light on the need for tackling climate change and achieving net zero and the role and importance of engineers in helping to solve the climate crisis. Our client NMITE (New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering) which welcomed its first cohort of aspiring engineers in September 2021 has been taking an active role in these conversations with articles on the front page of The Times, plus an ‘Editorial Leader’  slot in the same edition of the newspaper, being referenced by comedian David Mitchell in his Guardian column the following weekend, plus follow up pieces in the likes of WonkHE, Professional Engineering and EPDT.

The crux of the message from NMITE’s Elena Rodriguez-Falcon which has generated so much interest (hundreds of comments to the online articles, social media discussions and correspondence from everyone from engineering enthusiasts to the Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering) was that the discipline of engineering needs to be reclaimed and elevated to its rightful position by changing its name to ‘ingeniator’. Ingeniator is derived from the Latin words ingeniare (“to create, generate, contrive, devise”) and ingenium (“cleverness”) and Elena sees ingeniators as change-makers who use their ingenuity to create ideas, to generate answers, to contrive solutions, to devise products, processes and systems that can help us all in our pursuit to get this world back on track.

NMITE aims to create ingeniators who will be climate pioneers of the future, and hopes that initiatives like COP26 and Tomorrow’s Engineers Week continue to inspire passionate young people to enter the field, because we all recognise that it is the future of our planet at stake if we continue as we are.