GRAND CHALLENGES FOR ENVIRONMENT

Throughout human history, engineering has driven the advance of civilization. From the metallurgists who ended the Stone Age to the shipbuilders who united the world’s peoples through  ravel and trade, the past witnessed many marvels of engineering prowess. As civilization grew, it as nourished and enhanced with the help of increasingly sophisticated tools for agriculture, technologies for producing textiles, and inventions transforming human interaction and communication. Inventions such as the mechanical clock and the printing press irrevocably changed civilization. In the modern era, the industrial Revolution brought engineering’s influence to every niche of life, as machines supplemented and replaced human labor for countless tasks, improved systems for sanitation enhanced health, and the steam engine facilitated mining, powered trains and ships, and provided energy for factories. In the century just ended, engineering recorded its grandest accomplishments. The widespread development and distribution of electricity and clean water, automobiles and airplanes, radio and television, space craft and lasers, antibiotics and medical imaging, and computers and the Internet are just some of the highlights from a century in which engineering revolutionized and improved virtually every aspect of human life.

               
                 For all of these advances, though, the century ahead poses challenges as formidable as any from millennium past. As the population grows and its needs and desires expand, the problem of sustaining civilization’s continuing advancement, while still improving the quality of life, looms more immediate. Old and new threats to personal and public health demand more effective and more readily available treatments. Vulnerabilities to pandemic diseases, terrorist violence, and natural disasters require serious searches for new methods of protection and prevention. And products and processes that enhance the joy of living remains a top priority of engineering innovation, as they have been since the taming of fire and the invention of the wheel. In each of these broad realms of human concern — sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living — specific grand challenges await engineering solutions. The world’s cadre of engineers will seek ways to put knowledge into practice to meet these grand challenges. Applying the rules of reason, the findings of science, the aesthetics of art, and the spark of creative imagination, engineers will continue the tradition of forging a better future. Foremost among the challenges are those that must be met to ensure the future itself. The Earth is a planet of fi night resources, and its growing population currently consumes them at a rate that cannot be sustained. Widely reported warnings have emphasized the need to develop new sources of energy, at the same time as preventing or reversing the degradation of the environment. Sunshine has long offered a tantalizing source of environmentally friendly power, bathing the Earth with more energy each hour than the planet’s population consumes in a year. But capturing that power, converting it into useful forms, and especially storing it for a rainy day, poses provocative engineering and Environmental Challenges.