| Abstract |
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 healthcare; tackling the coupled issues of energy, transportation and climate change; providing more equitable access to information for our populations; clean drinking water; natural and man-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 retaining broader cross-sections of our youth, particularly women; strengthening the educational enterprise; forging more effective interdisciplinary alliances with the natural and social sciences and the arts; enhancing our focus on innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation, and promoting increased public awareness and support for the engineering enterprise. This volume, the first UNESCO Report on engineering, is an attempt to contribute to greater international understanding of the issues, challenges and opportunities 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 contributions from the international engineering community. This report is a worthy partner to four UNESCO science reports, the first of which was published in 1998. Although engineering is considered a component of “science” in the broad sense, engineering was not prominent in these reports. This opened the door to increasing calls from the international engineering community for an international study of engineering, and particularly of the role of engineering in international development. This report helps address the balance and need for such a study. As the director-general has noted, the future for engineering at UNESCO is also looking brighter following the proposal for an international engineering programme that was adopted at our recent executive board and general conference in October 2009. Given its pervasiveness, engineering is indeed a deep and diverse topic, as this report illustrates. We have tried to cover the breadth and depth of engineering as best we can, given the constraints we faced, and indeed Tony Marjoram and his team have done a wonderful job in pulling it all together. We hope the report will prove useful to a broad community, and are committed to continue to work together with our partners in the design of appropriate follow-up activities. [authors abstract]
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