Challenges and Opportunities in Delivering Environmental Engineering Education at the Higher Education Level

Environmental engineering has become more and more important to civil engineering in recent years in solving problems like water and wastewater management, air and soil contamination, global climate change, and waste and sustainable infrastructure. With the expansion of environmental engineering into wider subjects like chemistry, biology, ecology, data science, and environmental policy, higher education institutions are forced to accommodate this expanded knowledge base into their programme, credits, and financial framework, which has, for the most part, not changed much (ABET, 2026; Thürer et al., 2018). The current review of state-of-the-art discusses the main issues concerning the delivery of environmental engineering education in higher education institutions. Such issues include rigidity of curriculum, difficulty to incorporate new topics without undermining the foundation, interdisciplinary of the field, laboratory, field, and software resources, mismatch between academia and industry needs, dynamic regulatory and technological environment that makes it difficult to keep teaching up-to-date, and lack of specialist expertise of faculty members in higher educational institutes (ABET, 2026; Winberg et al., 2020; Vuoriainen et al., 2025). Moreover, the review looks at the range of potential opportunities that institutions have to address these pressures, such as digital and blended learning, industry partnership and work-based learning, sustainability and circular economy-based curriculum reform, collaboration across academic departments, and inter-institutional and international collaboration. Virtual laboratories have been shown to offer greater access to hands-on learning, and collaborations with industries can help students make the transition from academia to profession (Potkonjak et al., 2016; Vuoriainen et al., 2025).