Earlier this month, the US National Academy of Engineering released a report on "Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century." The goal is to focus attention on the potential of technology to help the world address poverty and environmental threats.
The list includes potential breakthroughs such as low-cost solar power, safe disposal of carbon dioxide from power plants, nuclear fusion, new educational technologies and the control of environmental side effects from nitrogen fertilizers. The report, like the Gates Foundation's similar list of "Grand Challenges" in global health, highlights a new global priority: promoting advanced technologies for sustainable development.
We are used to thinking about global cooperation in fields such as monetary policy, disease control or nuclear weapons proliferation. We are less accustomed to thinking of global cooperation to promote new technologies, such as clean energy, a malaria vaccine or drought-resistant crops to help poor African farmers.
By and large, we regard new technologies as something to be developed by businesses for the marketplace, not as opportunities for global problem solving.
Yet, given the enormous global pressures that we face, including vastly unequal incomes and massive environmental damage, we must find new technological solutions to our problems.
There is no way, for example, to continue expanding the global use of energy safely unless we drastically alter how we produce electricity, power automobiles, and heat and cool our buildings.
The reliance on coal, natural gas and petroleum, without regard for carbon dioxide emissions, is now simply too dangerous, because it is leading to climate changes that will spread diseases, destroy crops, produce more droughts and floods and perhaps dramatically raise sea levels, thereby inundating coastal regions.
The National Academy of Engineering identified some possible answers. We can harness safe nuclear energy, lower the cost of solar power, or capture and safely store the carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels. Yet the technologies are not yet ready and we can't simply wait for the market to deliver them, because they require complex changes in public policy to ensure that they are safe, reliable and acceptable to the broad public. Moreover, there are no market incentives in place to induce private businesses to invest adequately in developing them.
Consider carbon capture and sequestration. The idea is that power plants and other large fossil fuel users should capture the carbon dioxide and pump it into permanent underground storage sites, such as old oil fields. This would cost, say, US$30 per tonne of carbon dioxide that is stored, so businesses would need an incentive to do it. Moreover, public policies would have to be designed to promote the testing and improvement of this technology, especially when used at a large scale.
New kinds of power plants would have to be built to make carbon capture economical, new pipelines would have to be built to transport the carbon dioxide to storage sites and new monitoring systems would have to be designed to control leaks. Likewise, new regulations would be needed to ensure compliance with safety procedures, and to assure public support.
All of this would take time, costly investments and lots of collaboration between scientists and engineers in universities, government laboratories and private businesses. Moreover, this kind of technology would be useful only if it is widely used, notably in China and India. This raises another challenge of technological innovation: We need to support the transfer of proven technologies to poorer countries.
If rich countries monopolize new technologies, the goal of worldwide use to solve worldwide problems would be defeated. Thus, technological developments should involve a collaborative international effort from the start.
All of this requires a new global approach to problem solving. We need to embrace global goals and then establish scientific, engineering and political processes to support their achievement. We need to give new budgetary incentives to promote demonstration projects, and to support technology transfer.
And we have to engage major companies in a new way, giving them ample incentives and market rewards for success, without allowing them to hold a monopoly on successful technologies that should be widely adopted.
I believe that this new kind of global public-private partnership on technology development will be a major objective of international policy-making in the coming years. Look for new global cooperative approaches to clean energy systems, medicines and vaccines, improved techniques for fish farming, drought and temperature-resistant crop varieties, high-mileage automobiles and low-cost irrigation techniques.
Rich countries should fund these efforts heavily, and they should be carried out in collaboration with poor countries and the private sector. Successful technological breakthroughs can provide stunning benefits for humanity. This is an exciting time to be a scientist or engineer facing the challenges of sustainable development.
Jeffrey Sachs is a professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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