So the first thing is, I thought we’d start with this in terms of strategic asset management. If you are pursuing an engineering career that probably hopefully you are if you are doing this University of Auckland study, you are in one of the best careers in the world.
Simply because in your working lifetime, you are not going to run out of work. If you look at these numbers here, this came from McKinsey originally but this was from the Economist article, the world needs to spend $57 trillion US dollars capital on infrastructure in the next 15 years.
That’s a lot of projects. $57 trillion, so that’s worldwide. Around about 4% of world GDP per year.
And if we look at this graph here, if you’re doing transport infrastructure, so “Roads” is 16.6% of those, so the biggest chunk of the world infrastructure to spend in the next 15 years is targeted for roads.
Followed by “Power,” followed by “Water,” and the rest, anyone in those areas, so there’s just a lot of work to be done.
And, that’s just the capital. That’s not renewals, that’s not operations and maintenance, that’s just capital.
Now, the world doesn’t have that money to do that but it’s still huge amounts of money. So, the thing is that, can I encourage you in your career?
But what you’re doing is preparing yourself for a career in an industry that will be funded for your working lifetimes. There will be heaps of opportunities.
The world is actually short of civil engineers for the foreseeable future.
So you have a huge range of opportunities, whatever you decide you want to do you will be able to do it in civil engineering, because there aren’t enough people and because there’s lots of stuff to be done.
So, great, don’t just tell everybody else because I don’t want us to be overcrowded.
So okay the issues from a strategic point of view, lots to do, huge amounts of money to spend. The World doesn’t have the money, maybe a trillion dollars a year short at the moment.
So it’s how we are going to pay for it and obviously, new infrastructure creates ongoing operations, maintenance and then renewal costs.
And in strategic infrastructure management, even though the world’s planning to spend that amount of money, you still want us to spend it at the right place at the right time.
[…] So roughly, twice the amount of money that’s spent on any country’s military is spent on infrastructure across the whole […]