The Glasgow Climate Pact, signed at the 26th UN Conference of Parties (COP26) by 197 countries, reaffirmed global ambitions to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and avert a global climate catastrophe.
The scale and pace of the transition required to meet these goals presents an immense challenge. To keep on track, the world needs to reduce annual emissions by an additional 28 gigatons (that’s 28 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, beyond what has already been promised within unconditional Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). As governments, public authorities at all levels and businesses seek to address this challenge by scaling up and accelerating strategies to mitigate and adapt, engineers and technologists are poised to play a uniquely valuable role. Beyond their role as innovators, designers and developers of sustainable and resilient solutions, and their professional duty to protect the public and the environment, engineers are trained to think in systems (analysing multiple over-lapping systems to derive suitable paths for action).
This means they can help policymakers manage complexity, accelerate urgent, co-ordinated change across a wide range of interdependent socio-technical domains, and minimise unforeseen and unintended negative consequences.
CAETS, the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences, is an independent source of solution-focused expertise that policymakers everywhere can employ to help formulate the multi-disciplinary approaches required to respond to this crisis.