Facing Challenges Together

Abstract

From a wide view of human history, it is clear that engineering has continuously advanced the development of human civilization and society. At different developmental stages, humans are confronted with different problems that must be addressed with different key technologies. In the 21st century, humans have been confronted with critical problems such as starvation, resource scarcity, energy shortages, environmental pollution, climatic anomalies, population expansion, regional poverty, disease outbreaks, and economic crises, one after another. In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) put forward the 14 Grand Challenges to be addressed in the 21st century. In 2013 and 2015, the NAE, the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) jointly held two Global Grand Challenges Summits in London and Beijing, respectively, to carry out exchanges on how to use engineering technology to address the most pressing global grand challenges, and to discuss inter-disciplinary solutions. This issue contains valuable reflections from and solutions proposed by some of the speakers at the 2015 Global Grand Challenges Summit on major challenges relating to sustainability, infrastructure, energy, health, the joy of living, education, and security/resilience. We hope that these articles will exert a beneficial influence on forward-looking studies in the field of engineering technology. Climate change is a major challenge that has been facing the entire world in recent years. Global temperature increases have led to a series of problems including glacial ablation; sea level rise; frequent occurrences of typhoons, storms, and drought; and the destruction of coral reefs, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems. We were glad to hear that the Paris Conference on Climate Change agreed on the historical goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C. This