Engineering professions emerge when new technologies, new problems or new opportunities arise. This was the case when safety engineering grew in the early 1900s to combat the high workplace injury and fatality rates. In the 1960s, Environmental engineering emerged as a discipline to reduce industrial pollution and mitigate impacts on environmental health and water quality. Quality engineering came about with the increase in mass production techniques during WWII and the need to confirm the quality of the products. When engineered systems must change, either due to failure risks, obsolescence or modernisation, change management is a well-known process. Transition Engineering is focused on identifying the unsustainable aspects of currently operational engineered systems, innovating the projects that down-shift the unsustainable energy, material, environmental and social aspects, and then carrying out an inclusive change management process.
There are two serious problems driving the emergence of Transition Engineering; the exponential growth in the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and the lack of growth and imminent decline of conventional oil production sometimes characterised as peak oil. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ran past the "climate safe" 350 ppm range in the 1990s, and has now exceeded 420ppm, a level that Earth has not known for 800,000 years.   Transition engineering aims to take advantage of the current access to the remaining lower cost and higher EROI energy resources to re-develop all aspects of urban and industrial engineered systems to adapt as fossil fuel use is dramatically reduced.