This blog post marks the start of a wonderful online journey of three chemical engineering students through a semester of interesting and relevant topics concerned with the design for environment.
The first two class meetings have been very chill and yet these classes were the ones we enjoyed the most. The class is somewhat unpredictable in such a way that the things we do are seemingly not the kind of things we normally do in the other stressful ChE subjects that we love. For example, we actually watched a John Green video (Crash Course, hooray!), which in other classes would be something like An Inconvenient Truth or The Great Global Warming Swindle (not like there’s anything wrong with those films, but John Green was a surprise). When our professor said that we were going to watch a video about the history of trains, we expected a historical documentary that discussed very technical details about it, being narrated by a monotonous, old man. The Crash Course video was able to show the technicalities, with a lot of extra bits of information relevant to sustainability and change, while being awesome at the same time.
Anyway, enough about that and on to the actual topic.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about sustainable development. People of the world have started to realize how man’s actions have led to harmful effects in the environment. There have been different protocols and movements that sought to mitigate the damage, starting with the Stockholm Declaration in 1972, which recognized that the matter of the environment should be a global concern. This includes common principles to guide and inspire the people of the world in the preservation and enhancement of the human environment. Major concerns were resource management, human settlement, identification and control of international pollutants, development and the environment. This heightened environmental awareness in the world, and resulted in a greater desire and need to preserve our resources.
In 1987, Our Common Future was published, bringing about the idea of sustainable development – “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Several other protocols and movements followed, such as the Kyoto Protocol, the Montreal Protocol, and the Rio Earth Summit, among others. Currently, different governments and industries claim to be doing processes toward sustainable development. But with the continuous increase in the world’s population, will all these movements and processes really suffice?
According to The Economist, almost half of the world’s children may be African by the end of the century. This idea was mentioned in our ChE 198 class discussion regarding the anthropocene. In an STS class I had the day before, we discussed the similar topic of increasing population – the greatest percent increase belonging to the African population. It was explained that this was due to the fact that African women have the highest fertility rate, meaning they raised the greatest number of children on average compared to other countries of the world. This is shown in the african bulge, a forecast of the world’s population until the end of the century.
If this trend does continue, and the current state of Africa remains the same, the world is in big trouble. If right now, Africa is having a hard time feeding a billion people, what more if it reaches four times that size? And if we humans continue to abuse and exploit the environment, how will it be possible to sustain the Earth for future generations?
References:
[1] What is sustainable development. Retrieved January 27, 2015 from http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/sd.html
[2] Africa’s population: Can it survive such speedy growth?. Retrieved January 27, 2015 from http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21613349-end-century-almost-half-worlds-children-may-be-african-can-it
[3] Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. Retrieved January 27, 2015 from http://www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf
[4] Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Retrieved January 27, 2015 from http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?documentid=97&articleid=1503
Engineering Perspectives 