Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering

3. Environmental Impact: The Big Picture

The planet’s population is now approaching 7 billion—an increase of about 5 billion people in just the past five decades—and the total population is likely to increase by another 1 billion people in the next decade. Analysts now expect that the ranks of the middle class (people who may want your products!) will swell by as many as 1.8 billion in the next 12 years.¹

You’ve probably seen similar projections, and even though you know intellectually that an extra couple of billion people represents a sustainability challenge, it can be hard to relate those huge numbers to your job. So, to make the scale more ...