Toward a New Field of Global Engineering

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.

Recognizing New Trends in Brain Drain Studies in the Framework of Global Sustainability

“…However, considering the brain drain concept in a panoramic and non-specific way. Such panoramic perspective understands brain drain as a social phenomenon mainly related to sustainable technological development, a sustainability type that has recently been studied within the SDGs framework [121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130].…”

Product Design Supporting Improved Water, Sanitation, and Energy Services Delivery in Low-Income Settings

“…We have designed products to improve levels of service delivery and operations and maintenance practices for water infrastructure [10], to inform stakeholders regarding the use of sanitation technologies [11], to understand actual consumer behaviors around new technologies [12], to measure health impacts of interventions [10], to establish new methods for higher-efficiency sanitation service delivery [13], and to examine consumer behaviors in the face of climate change [14]. By providing products that can help service providers and public health practitioners fill in critical gaps in available data, these efforts have worked towards a more transparent and measurable field global engineering [15]. This paper presents an approach for the design of connected products to improve basic services delivery.…”

Humanitarian engineering at the sustainability-development nexus: mapping vulnerability and capability factors for communities at risk of water-based disasters

“…It supports disaster resilience mechanisms, and contributes to sustainable livelihood and socio-economic development (Mazzurco and Jesiek 2017 ; Sheroubi and Potvin 2018 ; Younger et al 2018 ). This conceptualization of humanitarian engineering is informed by, and overlaps with, two related fields; development engineering, which investigates solutions in societal challenges through science and technology (Nilsson et al 2014 ), and global engineering, which addresses worldwide challenges that are ongoing (e.g., poverty, water sanitation, and energy) as a practical driver of increased equity (Thomas 2019 ). Humanitarian and development engineering solutions can be considered practice elements of ‘developmental-relief’ transitional frameworks within the development sector (including community ‘resilience’ programming; Mosel and Levine 2014 ), and as a sub-set of global approaches which address challenges to humanity as a whole.…”

“…At the same time, supportive and cross-disciplinary actions at the community level should aim for a wider and stronger impact. These can include idiosyncratic approaches that are a ‘best fit’ for a single community, but also common solutions that can support design durability and the efficiency of manufacturing, distribution, and installation (Thomas 2019 ).…”