There was a meeting on Friday (November 1) titled “Sustainable Development: A New Role for the American Engineering Community.” The meeting was held in the conference room of the National Science Foundation, and followed a June meeting at the National Research Council. Both of course were related to the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Joburg, South Africa a couple of months ago.

I got to thinking about the difference between “sustainable engineering” and “engineering for sustainable development”. The first seems to rquire engineers to conceptualize engineering projects including the environmental impacts of the project, and sustainability of the things engineered. “Engineering for sustainable development” seems to me to be a much broader topic.

Let me make an aside, that sustainability without development seems simply immoral. Someone pointed out in the meeting that a child dies somewhere in the developing world every 8 seconds; most of these deaths could be prevented. Who would want to sustain that death rate rather than save the lives of those children? Who would want to sustain the situation in which 1.2 billion people are trying to survive on less than $1 per day rather than see these folk get richer? Nearly half the world’s population are living on less than $2 day – who wants to sustain such poverty?

Think about food production in the context of engineering for sustainable development. The world population will grow by a billion people in the next 10 or 15 years. We will have to provide enough to feed them. Moreover, a lot of people are now malnourished, and we need to increase the food for these folk. To improve diets, we need to produce a lot more milk, eggs, and meat. In order to do so, we will have to produce still more feed for livestock. If this increase in food production is to be done within the context of sustainable development, then we need to find ways to increase food production without destroying forests, increasing desertification, depleting fisheries, degrading topsoil, or increasing the rate of pollution from agricultural wastes.

The key to sustainable agricultural development is to increase the productivity of existing agricultural land. The Green Revolution is the great example of such an increase. The plant breeders have claimed the credit for the Green Revolution, emphasizing the role of improved plant varieties. These improved plant varieties were basically dwarf varieties with strong stalks, resulting in plants that would not fall down from the weight of the added grain obtained when they were irrigated, fertilized, and protected from plant pests and diseases. The engineers have received less credit for the Green Revolution, although they were largely responsible. Civil engineers built the irrigation systems and built the dams and drilled the wells that provided the water; mechanical and electrical engineers designed the pumps and were responsible for generating the power to run them; chemical and industrial engineers designed the factories that produced the fertilizer and pesticides. To further increase agricultural productivity, engineers will again play a central role, and indeed the engineers designing farm equipment may be more important in the next rounds.

But doubling food production within a framework of sustainable development means more profound changes. More specialization will probably be needed, producing on the best agricultural land, and moving that food to where people need it. Such changes mean great improvements in transportation, communications, and food storage and processing. Again the engineering professions will play key roles in these developments.

Then there arises the issue of the costs of food. I have suggested that food on the average should be grown with more irrigation, more costly inputs, and that it should be transported further, and better stored and processed. How are the poor to pay for all this? I think it clear that they must earn more, and to do so, they must be more productive on average. Productivity increases go hand in hand with technological change, and technological improvement is one of the businesses of the engineering profession.

This situation generalizes. More people, demanding a higher standard of living, will require more and better housing, more goods, more information, more education. The world will be more urban, and the challenge of urban development is not only finding ways to build livable megacities. Cities historically destroy the lands around them, and the larger the city and higher the standard of living of its citizens, the greater and more complete the zones of ecological destruction they have created. Sustainable development means finding ways to supply the goods and services for the developing world without destroying the environment in the process.

I could provide other examples, but all of them would probably miss the most important point. The push for sustainability is not coming from the poor, who are consumed with the efforts to survive and having a decent life; sustainability is a goal of the affluent. If we want the billions of people in the developing world to really focus on sustaining the global ecosystem, then we these people need to be more affluent. Thus, as in the past, engineers will have to provide the infrastructure and technology to help people become more affluent.

Development agencies are increasingly recognizing that development programs and policies don’t work in many countries – countries marked by incompetent and/or corrupt governments, violence, and a myriad of other fundamental problems. Engineering will not be successful in these environments. Good policies and adequate social and economic institutions come first. If the politicians and economists can help develop the policies and institutions in which wealth can be created, then the engineers can really go to work producing the technology and the physical infrastructure needed for development! And they can not only do sustainable engineering, but engineer sustainable development.