About
Climate change impacts women, children, and underrepresented communities (like those in the Global South, indigenous groups, or impoverished backgrounds) the most.
When disasters hit, these communities suffer more due to biased decision-making, limited resources, and a lack of information. (UN Women, 2025)
Did you know that...
Climate disasters intensify social and economic stress, leading to spikes in gender-based violence. (UNFPA, 2024)
One billion children live in countries at extremely high risk from climate impacts. (UNICEF UK, 2021)
Indigenous Peoples, migrants, and persons with disabilities are among the most climate-vulnerable groups. (LSE Inequalities, 2025)
Women can be the agents of change that engineering needs to tackle these challenges: inclusive innovation ecosystems—often led by women—are more likely to produce technologies that reflect the needs of diverse communities (World Economic Forum, 2023).
Failure Modes of Engineering (FeME) focuses on engineering solutions for climate change and biodiversity loss, and their impact on women, children and underrepresented communities. Our goal is to empower them as vital agents for the future of engineering.
In engineering, understanding potential failures is as crucial as understanding how systems work. FeME applies a “failure mode” approach – a systems engineering tool – to identify and prevent breakdowns in the complex relationship between engineering, nature, and society. This whole-systems method focuses on preventing system breakdowns rather than just understanding ideal function.
FeME collaborates with the international research community and industry to identify and address the failure modes of the present engineering discipline, to understand how to mitigate the urgent challenges that the climate crisis is bringing in a more fair and equitable way.
Our approach has been co-designed around six Failure Modes
Diverse Engineering
Inspired Engineering
Connected Engineering
Inclusive Engineering
Transdisciplinary Engineering
Agile Engineering
