Engineering Geology Research Area

Engineering geology plays a crucial role in successfully addressing and managing some of the major challenges facing society, for example providing a secure supply of drinking water, managing contaminated sites to protect human health and ecosystems, limiting negative impacts on structures and the environment from underground construction, and using underground resources such as groundwater, rock materials and space, responsibly and sustainably.

Our research

The discipline of Engineering Geology is broad. At Chalmers, our research area comprises four key topics:

Drinking water supply and protection
Management of contaminated land and soil
Management of hydrogeological risks in construction
Management of subsurface resources

We develop theory, methods, and tools for advanced modelling (process-based, data-driven, and hybrid), uncertainty analysis, risk assessment, and decision support, including cost-benefit analysis and multi-criteria analysis. A trademark of our work is the interdisciplinary integration of geological, hydrogeological, and engineering aspects with social, economic, and environmental impact analyses to support strategic decision-making under uncertainty.

Challenges we address

We consider the following five challenges to be in focus in the EGR area:

How can risks to and values of services provided by the geological system to humans (space, groundwater, material resources, habitat, and more) be accounted for in planning and decision-making in the built environment for resilient infrastructure and water supply, sustainable land development and soil management?
How can modelling of natural and technical systems in combination be improved in riskmassessments using data-driven and hybrid process-based models?
What is the value of information from different approaches for site investigations and modelling to relevant and reliable decision support for managing risks in engineering geology?
How can the concept Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SPPs) of the IntergovernmentalnPanel for Climate Change (IPCC) be integrated into the decision-support models in engineering geology?
How can Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) be used to restore, protect, and utilise geological and hydrogeological resources to allow for a sustainable supply of services to the built environment?