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

The critical roles of engineering in addressing the large-scale pressing challenges facing our societies worldwide are widely recognized.Such large-scale challenges include access to affordable health care; tackling the coupled issues of energy, transportationand climate change; providing more equitable access to information for our populations; clean drinking water; natural andman-made disaster mitigation, environmental protection and natural resource management, among numerous others. As such,mobilizing the engineering community to become more effective in delivering real products and services of benefit to society,especially in the developing world, is a vitally important international responsibility.Engineering as a human endeavour is also facing numerous additional challenges of its own, including attracting and retainingbroader cross-sections of our youth, particularly women; strengthening the educational enterprise; forging more effectiveinterdisciplinary alliances with the natural and social sciences and the arts; enhancing our focus on innovation, entrepreneurshipand job creation, and; promoting increased public awareness and support for the engineering enterprise. This volume, the firstUNESCO Report on engineering, is an attempt to contribute to greater international understanding of the issues, challenges andopportunities facing engineering, with a particular focus on contributions of our discipline to sustainable development.The Report, one of the most cost-effective reports UNESCO has published, is based almost entirely on voluntary contributionsfrom the international engineering community. I would like to begin by thanking the over hundred contributors. I would also liketo commend the coordinating and editorial team for their efforts – Tony Marjoram, Andrew Lamb, Francoise Lee, Cornelia Haukeand Christina Rafaela Garcia, supported by Maciej Nalecz, Director of UNESCO’s Basic and Engineering Sciences Division. I wouldalso like to offer my heartfelt appreciation to our partners – Tahani Youssef, Barry Grear and colleagues in the World Federationof Engineering Organisations, Peter Boswell, John Boyd and colleagues in the International Federation of Consulting Engineers,Bill Salmon, Gerard van Oortmerssen and colleagues in the International Council of Academies of Engineering and TechnologicalSciences. I also thank the members of the editorial advisory committee, and especially the co-chair, Kamel Ayadi, for their help ingetting the Report off the ground.This Report is a worthy partner to four UNESCO Science Reports, the first of which was published in 1998. Although engineeringis considered a component of “science” in the broad sense, engineering was not prominent in these reports. This opened thedoor to increasing calls from the international engineering community for an international study of engineering, and particularlyof the role of engineering in international development. This Report helps address the balance and need for such a study. As theDirector-General has noted, the future for engineering at UNESCO is also looking brighter following the proposal for an InternationalEngineering Programme that was adopted at our recent Executive Board and General Conference in October 2009.PrefaceGretchen Kalonji, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences, UNESCOGiven its pervasiveness, engineering is indeed a deep and diverse topic, as this report illustrates. We have tried to cover thebreadth and depth of engineering as best we can, given the constraints we faced, and indeed Tony Marjoram and his team havedone a wonderful job in pulling it all together. We hope the Report will prove useful to a broad community, and are committedto continue to work together with our partners in the design of appropriate follow-up activities.5