Global Engineering and Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

The role of engineers in contributing to global poverty reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals is evolving. Typically, the engineer’s role in addressing global poverty challenges has often been confined to community, regional or national scale service interventions and product design and development. Nevertheless, despite fifty years of these approaches, over half the world’s population still lives on less than $5.50 a day, the global burden of disease in low-income countries is overwhelmingly attributable to environmental health issues, and climate change is already negatively impacting people, most significantly in developing countries. The conventional engineering approaches to poverty reduction are insufficient to address the Sustainable Development Goals. The emerging field of Global Engineering can address these structural issues, through developing and validating methods, tools, and standards that are broadly useful. Global Engineering envisions a world in which everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter and infrastructure and can live in health, dignity, and prosperity.

The aim and scope of this Special Issue of Sustainability is to present and review emerging engineering methods, technologies, and evidence that work to address the unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services such as water, sanitation, energy, food, transportation, and shelter. Examples may include technology and methods development and validation, data collection, and impact evaluations that can contribute to evidence-based influence on policies and practice. Examples may place an emphasis on identifying the drivers, determinants, and solutions favoring equitable access to basic services. 

Papers selected for this Special Issue will be subject to a rigorous peer review procedure with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Evan Thomas
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.