Calling Engineers to Rise to the Challenges of Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs)

The United Nations has a bold and audacious plan to transform the world through "The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development". The tools for achieving the agenda are the UN's recently implemented 17 Sustainable Development Goals. "While some of the goals may be outside the purview of engineering, successful implementation of many of these goals will require substantial new engineering, re-engineering, and retrofitting across all engineering disciplines" (Workshop on the "Technical and Engineering Challenges of Addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals", November 2018). This paper will explain and stress the importance of engineers becoming intimately familiar with the UN SDGs and how they are inseparable from the need for sustainable infrastructure. This will be accomplished by presenting the outcomes from the above referenced workshop, with methods and techniques to put them into action, thereby enabling engineers to engage in new and innovative ways to meet the technical and engineering challenges of the UN SDGs.