Thanks to engineering and engineers, today, we are provided a more comfortable and entertaining world with better sanitation, transportation and high quality of life. It is such a pleasure for us to enjoy the convenience and comfort of life, but at the same time, we are continuously consuming the finite resources on the earth and doing harm to the environment.
Nature gives us extremely great quantity of materials and energy to use in building our country and improving our life, but not infinite. Wood, water, petroleum, mineral and many other materials are the resources that cannot be regenerated. It means that once they are used up, we will no longer have the access to them. Nowadays, more and more reports show that human beings are facing the challenge of energy shortage. Therefore, we must immediately look forwards and develop new sources of energy, such as renewable energy and nuclear energy which can meet the demand of sustainable development. However, these renewable energy and nuclear energy are more expensive than the traditional energy because they are more difficult to obtain and most people cannot afford them. Thus, to meet the challenge of sustainable development in the futures of engineering, engineers are required to manufacture some energy that is not only sustainable but also accessible by most people.
Moreover, global warming, land degradation and more and more natural disasters caution people to pay more attention to take care of our environment as the world industrialized. In the past one hundred since the 1st industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, people blindly wanted to fast the industrialization progress, and ignore the harm of the pernicious gases emitted and waste released to the environment and our health, so now we should make full use of the “clean” energy and minimize the pollution as long as engineering develops.
All in all, when we see the grand accomplishments of engineering, we should realize the challenge of sustainable development in the future of engineering. Only to meet all those challenges can we make our world a more healthy, safe and sustainable place to live in.
