Abstract
This chapter presents the field of Global Engineering, and identifies that engineers should be concerned with the unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services, such as water, sanitation, energy, food, transportation, and shelter, and as engineers we should place an emphasis on identifying the drivers, determinants, and solutions to increasing equitable access to reliable services. Engineers must become activists and advocates, leveraging our professional skills and capacity to generate evidence and positive impact toward rectifying inequalities and improving lives. Engineers must reject the ahistorical, technocratic and neo-colonial conceit that poverty can be solved through products or projects, or on a community scale that requires the poorest people to overcome historical and structural inequalities and injustices. Global Engineering envisions a world where everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter, and infrastructure, and can live in health, dignity, and prosperity. This chapter adapts and updates the 2019 publication in Sustainability, “Toward a New Field of Global Engineering” (Thomas 2019).
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Thomas, E. (2020). What Is Global Engineering?. In: The Global Engineers . Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50263-8_1
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