Toward a New Field of Global Engineering

Evan Thomas
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Evan Thomas: Mortenson Center in Global Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder Colorado, CO 80303, USA

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 14, 1-11

Abstract: The Engineer’s role in addressing global poverty challenges has often been confined to village and community-scale interventions, product design and development, or large-scale infrastructure design and construction. Yet despite fifty years of these approaches, over half the world’s population still lives on less than $5.50 a day, the global burden of disease in low-income countries is overwhelmingly attributable to environmental health contaminants, and climate change is already negatively affecting people in developing countries. The conventional community, product or infrastructure focuses of development engineering is insufficient to address these global drivers that perpetuate poverty. The emerging field of Global Engineering can work to identify and address these structural issues. Global Engineering should be concerned with the unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services such as water, sanitation, energy, food, transportation and shelter, and place an emphasis on identifying the drivers, determinants and solutions favoring equitable access. Technology development and validation, data collection and impact evaluation can contribute to evidence-based influence on policies and practice. Global Engineering envisions a world in which everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter and infrastructure, and can live in health, dignity, and prosperity.

Keywords: global engineering; sustainable development; sustainable development goals; poverty reduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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