The humanitarian face of engineering

There is more than one professional title to describe Dr Josh Macabuag OBE FREng and what he does because his career is multifaceted. He’s a structural engineer with a background in building design whose day job for the past 12 years has been in catastrophe risk modelling, quantifying the risks and costs of natural disasters. In early 2026, this role took on another facet as he was made CEO of Renew Risk – a company he co-founded in 2021 to revolutionise risk management for renewable energy by building software and other solutions for insurers, banks and developers of renewable infrastructure assets such as windfarms and solar farms.

Natural disasters are also central to his second life, through his role as an urban search and rescue engineer with Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID), which entails finding and extricating people trapped in collapsed buildings. Macabuag has been deployed as a volunteer engineer to many humanitarian missions abroad, including the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015 and Turkey in 2023.

“And at some point, I decided to call myself a disaster risk engineer,” he adds. “It’s a made-up term because all three words are important to me.” 

However, another of Macabuag’s titles came as a big surprise, at least to him: OBE, which he received in HM The King’s 2025 Birthday Honours list. He’s happy the award acknowledges his long-held goal “to use engineering as a vocation for humanitarian purposes.” But it is not his alone, it belongs to his fellow search and rescue engineers and others too, he insists. 

Early influences and ninja turtles

Macabuag recalls where his interest in engineering started, during his childhood, “growing up on a council estate in Romford in Essex. There were no engineers in my family, but my father was a car mechanic. He used to call himself a mechanical engineer, and I used to argue with him about that,” he grins. “I don’t know anything about cars myself, I wish I did, it would be useful. But my dad’s job did have an influence on my interests, I’m sure.” 

Another influence on his career is perhaps more surprising: an animated cartoon series about four martial arts loving turtles. “As a kid in the 1990s I watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on TV a lot. My favourite was Donatello, the engineer. He has all the gadgets and fixes things.” That character was also smart, calm and clear-headed – essential qualities in a disaster response engineer? “Well, I’m not saying ninja turtles decided my career,” he laughs, “but I did always admire technical ability. Like on Star Trek, it was the guys down in engineering who got everything working.”

Like those turtles, the young Macabuag was a dab-hand at martial arts, good for developing fast reactions and coordination. But it was his talents in maths, science and technology that were really flourishing. “I guess I discovered engineering through maths and physics … It was almost accidental, more a case of what I was interested in.” 

While reading a careers manual he discovered structural engineering. “It was about making stadiums, buildings and bridges, and I remember thinking: now that is interesting.” He was fascinated by structural engineering’s part in designing other large structures such as wind turbines and rollercoasters, ensuring they are technically safe and stable; and using computers to simulate how structures will be influenced by factors such as bad weather. 

Macabuag was “the first in my family to go beyond O levels”. He applied to the University of Oxford, choosing a general engineering science course to give him a broader understanding of other disciplines. “I had a strong feeling I wanted to work in civil engineering, but I didn’t know much about it then.” 

Learning on the job

Before starting at university, he wanted to try working: “I was very lucky to be offered a year’s work experience at Arup, one of the top, if not the top, civil structural engineering companies in the world. It has worked on the sort of structures you look at and wonder: ‘how did they do that?’.” These include Sydney Opera House, HSBC HQ in Hong Kong and Apple Park in the US, and rail projects such as the Elizabeth Line and High Speed 2. 

He was tasked at Arup with “building in-house software for the thermodynamics of buildings, heating and cooling, that sort of thing”; and building “the front end, the user interface” he says. “That was my first exposure to programming. As I now run a company that creates software for catastrophe modelling, my gap year was definitely seminal.” And so were lunchtime talks he attended there – “I went mainly for the free sandwiches, and as I’d eaten them I had to stay till the end,” he jokes. 

One talk was by an engineer associated with the learning and development NGO RedR (which then stood for Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief), which was a game-changer. “The speaker was talking about international development and working overseas – I recall Africa and elephants being mentioned. It made me sit up and think: ah, so you can do that [humanitarian work] with engineering. That really stuck with me.” 

Macabuag recalls watching the news about the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. It was one of the worst natural disasters ever, resulting in about one-quarter of a million lives lost and many thousands injured. “I was in Jamaica with my dad, who’s from there. I was watching the reports, thinking this is really bad. I had not long started at university, and I remember feeling very helpless, just thinking what can I do about this?” That disaster would later strengthen his resolve to work in a field he now describes as “disaster resilience or any disaster happening around the world, and what we can do about it”.

His time at Oxford meanwhile developed “a very strong work ethic” in him that would be “very beneficial” when he began his engineering career. He also made invaluable professional relationships and contacts while there. Some originated from the day he was offered a summer job, working on Japan Railways’ Shinkansen (bullet trains), the country’s high-speed rail network renowned for its punctuality, comfort and safety. 

“I was super chuffed about the job offer and I was on my way to hand in some course work when I bumped into one of my professors, Suby [Professor Subhamoy Bhattacharya]. I told him about the offer, and by chance – everything’s by chance, right? – he said he knew earthquake risk researchers in Japan and he could introduce me to them.” He did and Macabuag went to meet them, “in fact we’re all still in touch 20 years later.”

His close affiliation with Bhattacharya continued too. Professor Bhattacharya and Macabuag would later become co-founders, along with two others, of Renew Risk. 

Into the field

His first humanitarian mission abroad came in 2008, when he went to work in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a charity supporting engineers in international development work. “[As a team of engineers] we were supporting the community with facilities like water reticulation, low-cost housing … people facing very difficult living conditions and problems.” He sometimes felt “the gravity and scale of issues” were “insurmountable” but it was also a “fantastic and very formative” year.

Back in the UK, he started his career as a design engineer. In parallel he led the London professional network of EWB and set up projects on earthquake retrofitting for low-income housing in Nepal and Peru, organising the funding himself from sources including the Institution of Structural Engineers. His paper in 2009, investigating the use of polypropylene straps to earthquake-proof buildings in Nepal, won first prize in a competition by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). The win was “a great confidence boost” for him to carry on in that field, and he used the prize money to make further investigations in Peru. 

Macabuag made two more inspiring contacts around then: Professor Paul Jowitt CBE FREng FRSE (then President of ICE), who he was apprenticed to, and with whose backing, he helped create an engineer’s handbook on the delivery of the Millennium Development Goals; and Jean Venables CBE FREng, ICE President before Jowitt, and the first woman to be elected in the role. Venables had reviewed his pitch for funding to do research in Nepal and Peru. “I was looking holistically at the problem of international development and engineering, and it was a great year of speaking to some of the best minds in that field,” he says: “Paul and Jean have been incredibly seminal people in my career and life, and continue to be so.”

When Japan was hit by a devastating tsunami in 2011, generated by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the country’s northeastern coast, Macabuag was deployed there a fortnight later on a reconnaissance mission. He went with the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT, which is affiliated with the Institution of Structural Engineers). “EEFIT’s remit is to learn from disasters, bring back key lessons and disseminate them among built environment professionals. I felt honoured to be part of it.” He became Chair of EEFIT several years later.

From design to disasters

The Japan mission would be influential for him too: when he returned, he made two life-changing decisions. One was to leave design engineering after five years, to study catastrophe modelling, which he describes as what can go wrong, how often and how bad, and what can be done about it. 

“My technical passion lies in risk modelling and catastrophe modelling,” he explains. “Essentially, it’s about quantifying risks to enable people to make informed decisions in managing those risks, ultimately making lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure safer.” His PhD, at University College London, was sponsored by an insurance company. That makes sense, as the science uses computer-assisted calculations and data to estimate costs where there is physical loss, such as damage to buildings, or indeed loss of life, and mostly originated in the insurance industry. It has broader applications too, he says, “anywhere you can imagine risk happening. Governments also need that kind of information.” He was to be employed by the World Bank, working with the Global Program for Disaster Risk Analytics, under Rashmin Gunasekera. He modelled the impacts of disasters for governments in low- and middle-income countries to advise them on their disaster risk, “supporting ministries of finance in making decisions about their earthquake and hurricane risk, their civil protection teams, and so on.”

His second big decision was to join SARAID as a volunteer engineer. He’d long wished to but wanted to be chartered first (which he was in 2012). SARAID is the first and only UK voluntary team to be officially classified by the UN International Search and Rescue Advisory Group as a light urban search and rescue (USAR) team. 

His first mission with SARAID was to Nepal, in the aftermath of the earthquake in April 2015. Known as the Gorkha earthquake, it had a magnitude of 7.8 and was the worst earthquake in 80 years to hit the country. The earthquake resulted in the loss of almost 9,000 lives and widespread destruction to homes and hospitals. 

When the SARAID team, usually 15 to 20 members, is called out, “the idea is to go immediately, but if you’re going internationally (as SARAID does) you’re generally going quite far and to places where the transport and aviation structures are often damaged. If you’re in front of a damaged building within 48 hours of an earthquake, say, you’ve done well.” 

Search and rescue “isn’t just about running around collapsed buildings, pulling people out of rubble. That’s kind of the last bit,” he says. “It’s everything up until then, from when there’s been a disaster, to deciding to go, getting to the country, coordinating with others in the field, understanding where you need to go, getting there, enacting those rescues. A lot happens in every one of those phases. You navigate all those to get to that last one: going into the building and supporting the people.” 

The SARAID team train together one weekend a month: “We come from all around the country, we know each other very well, we are friends.” He stresses they are all unpaid volunteers and the organisation relies on donations to continue its valuable work. Deployment to a disaster zone is usually two or three weeks: “The rest of the time we get on with our day jobs.” 

For Macabuag that now means leading Renew Risk and focusing on its vision to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world, “calculating the analytics, which means informed quantitative decision-making and analysis around disasters for renewable energy, such as wind farms, solar farms, battery storage. And not just disaster risk, but all forms of risk.” For renewable energy to be sustainable, “it has to be resilient” and making informed decisions on resilience requires “good data and a good understanding of that. So my passion now is leading a growing company that provides end-to-end software and consulting solutions to answer those questions.”

Renew Risk is based at Lloyds of London. The team of 20 has already achieved a lot in the four years since it was founded; and last year it raised £4.7 million to forge a bridge between the renewable energy sector and financial markets – funds that will enhance its proprietary risk models, grow its team of risk modellers and climate experts, and extend its market reach globally. 

He is keen that his work has a positive impact on people’s lives, whether that’s through search and rescue, humanitarian work such as damage assessment, or renewable energy. 

“I remember being at the Science Museum with my daughter, showing off my engineering knowledge, and she asked, ‘What do you do about climate change?’ I didn’t really have a good answer at the time. That moment wasn’t the reason I started the company, but it certainly made me reflect. Now, I’m proud that we’ve founded a company that takes our expertise in risk management and applies it to renewable energy, helping to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future.” 

Teamwork behind the missions

If his USAR role has a downside, it’s the impact it has on his family. “The imposition I know I’m having on [them], when I’m training and I’m leaving my wife to look after our kids,” he says, referring to his daughter, ten, and son, six. “When I went to the Albanian earthquakes, in 2019, my son was only three weeks old. So, the weight I’m putting on my wife, is immense. That’s the worst part. But that is countered by the love and care [they] give me.” 

Which takes us back to the OBE. It took him by such surprise he didn’t at first believe it was real. “I genuinely thought it was a hoax, but it was on expensive looking paper, headed Cabinet Office, so it looked like it could be an elaborate hoax.” Once he was convinced it was true, he still had mixed feelings: “Why would I be picking up an OBE when SARAID, for example, is made up of many people, all who put in amazing work and effort, many of them far greater than my own and for longer. I’m very proud to be picking up an OBE but [the award] is entirely about the team.” Still, he admits it was fun to have gone to pick it up at St James’s Palace with his family.

He wants any credit for his achievements to be shared with “all the people I’ve been working with.” That includes many at SARAID such as fellow engineer Mark Scorer, the teams at the World Bank and Renew Risk, Paul Jowitt, Jean Venables, and Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE (former CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering), “who played a significant role in promoting engineering excellence and diversity during her tenure”. 

He pays it back to those coming up behind him via his involvement in the Academy’s This is Engineering campaign, which encourages young people to follow their passions into an engineering career. It is a “real honour to be involved with,” Macabuag says. If the young people seeing the campaign share his perspective on engineering as “seeing a problem as a challenge and taking an analytical approach to break that challenge down and solve each of the steps of that problem to have an impact on the world,” he feels they will be on the right track.

“Engineering is the lifeblood of society, of making everything we have and we do. It not just the Donatellos, the guys using the spanners, who are changing and doing things. It’s everything around it. Engineering has so many useful applications for positive societal change.” 

And if anyone should ask him, as they have, whether working in disaster response is “depressing and morbid,” he has a positive answer for them: “I can honestly say no, not at all. Now, if I see a disaster on TV, I think, OK, that is terrible – let’s do something about it.”