Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT2.2 Engineering, innovation, social and economicdevelopmentPaul JowittThe Great Age of Engineering?It’s easy to think, from the Western perspective, that the greatdays of engineering were in the past during the era of massivemechanization and urbanization that had its heyday in thenineteenth century and which took the early Industrial Revolutionfrom the eighteenth century right through into the twentiethcentury which, incidently, simultaneously improved thehealth and well-being of the common person with improvementsin water supply and sanitation. That era of great engineeringenjoyed two advantages: seemingly unlimited sourcesof power, coal, oil and gas, and a world environment of apparentlyboundless capacity in terms of water supply, materialsand other resources relative to human need.Now we know differently. We face two issues of truly globalproportions – climate change and poverty reduction. Thetasks confronting engineers of the twenty-first century are:■■engineering the world to avert an environmental crisiscaused in part by earlier generations in terms of energy use,greenhouse gas emissions and their contribution to climatechange, andengineering the large proportion of the world’s increasingpopulation out of poverty, and the associated problemsencapsulated by the UN Millennium Development Goals.This will require a combination of re-engineering existing infrastructuretogether with the provision of first-time infrastructureat a global scale.And the difference between now and the nineteenth century?This time the scale of the problem is at a greater order of magnitude;environmental constraints are dangerously close tobeing breached; worldwide competition for scarce resourcescould create international tensions; and the freedom to powerour way into the future by burning fossil fuels is denied.Resolving these issues will require tremendous innovation andingenuity by engineers, working alongside other technical andnon-technical disciplines. It requires the engineer’s ability tosynthesize solutions and not simply their ability to analyseproblems. It needs the engineers’ ability to take a systems viewat a range of scales, from devices and products through to thelarge-scale delivery of infrastructure services.This means that the great age of engineering is NOW.Let us briefly examine the key issues.© P. Jowitt‘Poverty is Real’The immediate prospects for both the urban and rural poorin many parts of the world is bleak with little or no access toeven the most basic of infrastructure, education and healthcare,and with little or at best tenuous, legal rights to land orproperty. Civil engineeringconstruction.39