All forms of development impose an inevitable burden on the natural
environment. For sustainable development, this burden must be within the self-resilient
limits of the natural environment. However, practical implementation of sustainable
development is accompanied by great hardship, as is evident from the lukewarm
international efforts in reducing carbon emissions for the prevention of global warming.
This is because nature conservation and environmental protection, a major keystone in
the concept of sustainable development, contends with powerful opponents such as
technological convenience and economic validity in the real world. Thus, sustainable
development implies the difficult task of achieving both conservation and advancement
to engineers in numerous fields. As geotechnical engineering deals with the earth, it
can make a great contribution to efficient sustainable development. Best examples are
the development of underground space for the next generation and the development of
energy with minimum impact on the natural environment. The boundaries of human life
are limited to the physical space on earth and are inevitably based on the ground.
Hence, the utilization of underground space has the potential of doubling the available
space for human use. In addition, the use of conventional fossil fuels are limited by
various technological and economic restrictions, whereas the ground is an area of
opportunity that can both supply conventional and non-conventional fossil fuels and
reduce damages caused by the use of fossil fuels, mainly CO2.