Tag: Engineering

Risks of bridge collapses are real and set to rise — here’s why

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The catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, on 26 March stunned the public and engineers alike. Six workers lost their lives after a container ship lost power and crashed into one of the bridge supports. The Port of Baltimore and the city’s road-transport network remain hobbled. And serious questions linger about the ineffectiveness of measures for preventing such disasters.

Although an identical scenario is unlikely to happen elsewhere, bridge collapses occur surprisingly often (see ‘Deadly bridge collapses’). In 2018, for example, part of the Polcevera Viaduct in Genoa, Italy, crashed to the ground during a rainstorm, killing 43 people. And many cases don’t make the headlines. In China between 2000 and 2014, for example, more than 300 highway bridge failures caused 564 fatalities and 917 injuries¹.

Bridges are the most vulnerable and expensive assets of transportation networks. Beyond lives lost and the costs of replacement, the failure of a single bridge can hinder movement of people and goods in a region for months or years. Displaced traffic generates more congestion, pollution, road wear and accidents elsewhere. Delays in the delivery of goods disrupt global supply chains. Economic losses of bridge failures can mount to millions of dollars per day and spiral quickly²^,³. Indirect losses (such as from increased travel time) can be 5–20 times greater than the direct losses⁴.

Source: Analysis by J. M. Adam et al.

Clearly, preventing bridges from collapsing is crucial. However, as bridges age, it becomes increasingly challenging to evaluate and ensure their structural safety. During the long service life of a bridge — typically 100 years — the vehicles and trains crossing them inevitably evolve, imposing loads that can exceed those considered when the bridges were conceived. Long-term changes to vehicles and traffic also expose bridges to collision risks that might not have been considered during design.

Deterioration of materials reduces the strength of structural components and is exacerbated by climate change and heat⁵^–⁷. Extreme weather events that are more frequent and intense expose bridges to increased scour from water flow and more landslides and subsidence, with overall impacts that are difficult to predict⁸. Thus, ageing bridges are faced with greater risks and uncertainties that make it harder to evaluate their safety.

What needs to be done? Here we outline the problems and highlight how the world’s bridges can be made safer through better standards, maintenance, preparedness and lessons drawn from other industries.

Update standards

Current safety codes and standards still lack guidance on how to deal with the increasing risks of material deterioration and more frequent extreme events. Most codes focus on the design of new bridges, not on evaluating the safety of old ones. Yet the two scenarios raise different problems.

For example, designing the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey, which opened in 2022, required optimizing aerodynamic performance. Ensuring the safety of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK, which opened in 1864, requires protecting wrought-iron chain links that were manufactured for a previous bridge 180 years ago and understanding past safety interventions from the sparse information that is available.

A few national and international standards do address assessment and retrofitting of existing bridges — such as through technical specifications intended to be used with the first generation of Eurocodes, which are due to be updated next year (see go.nature.com/3wdrmes). However, these standards cover only general principles to assess current needs for structural interventions, not how to avoid bridge collapses in an uncertain future⁹.

The design of the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey, which opened in 2022, required aerodynamic modelling.Credit: Burak Akay/Anadolu Agency/Getty

Methods of evaluation also rely on historical data and trends to characterize loads due to traffic, vehicle impacts and environmental conditions. Yet, these vary widely through time and might not reflect future conditions.

The growing number of cars and trucks on roads means that bridges have to withstand a higher frequency of passage of vehicles, which can accelerate the growth of cracks and failures. Rail traffic is also increasing, as are the weight and length of freight trains. The load-carrying capacity of container ships docking in ports today has increased by almost 1,500% since 1968 (see go.nature.com/4dacdfp). The force imparted by such enormous vessels if they impact a bridge pier is unstoppable, as Baltimore tragically witnessed.

Global climate models also predict a wide range of possible future scenarios, casting more doubt on how today’s bridges will withstand extreme weather events over their lifetimes⁸.

Thus, bridge safety needs to be evaluated in a more holistic way, by combining comprehensive assessments of risks and data collected on existing bridges¹⁰.

Cement and steel — nine steps to net zero

This will require four advances. One, more accurate methods to estimate environmental and operational loads that can cope with evolving predictions. Two, better models of how climate change will influence deterioration. Three, harmonized protocols for processing and interpreting data on the structural response of bridges. And four, dynamic decision-support tools that provide timely and relevant information to bridge managers.

Early efforts in this direction are under way. For example, through the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE), bridge specialists are collaborating to propose safety assessment procedures that consider new hazards and to revise methods for assessing the reliability of existing structures. However, such developments are still not enough to change common practice.

Regulatory and standardization processes require agreements between many actors, from policymakers to practitioners. The European Commission is paving the way, and has committed to modernizing standards for the maintenance and control of European transport infrastructure, including bridges. To achieve this, it funded the IM-SAFE project (2020–23; go.nature.com/3qscerw) to review existing surveying and monitoring technologies and propose data flows for managing structures. Firm commitments from the commission, as well as acceptance of new codes by infrastructure managers, will be crucial for the successful design and release of a new standard in the next decade.

Repair worn bridges

The huge backlog of bridge repairs must be addressed urgently. In the United States alone, more than 46,000 bridges are considered structurally deficient, and some 178 million trips are taken on these bridges every day (see go.nature.com/3k41ztg). Repair costs have been put at US$125 billion. In Europe, at least 9,000 bridges require strengthening or repair¹¹. These are alarming numbers, particularly considering how little data are available on the condition of bridges in other parts of the world.

As well as being cheaper than rebuilding, extending the lifespan of bridges brings environmental benefits. These include reductions in resource consumption, waste generation and carbon dioxide emissions.

Curb hazards and limit failure

Resilience, through better preparedness, is key to preventing catastrophic bridge collapses. In practice, that means that a transport system must be able to keep providing the service if a disruptive event occurs.

Engineers and bridge managers must develop a better understanding of the three stages that lead to structural collapse. These are: occurrence of a hazard; initial failure of a component owing to damage; and the propagation of failures through the structure. Various risk reduction measures are effective at each stage and can be used together to prevent collapse.

Engineers install sensors on a road bridge in Herne, Germany, after finding its girders had bent.Credit: Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa/Alamy

First, policies or interventions can reduce the probability of a hazard occurring. A ship collision, for example, can be mitigated by establishing protective islands around piers. Road and rail traffic can be limited to reduce the chance of overloading. For example, in the United Kingdom, highway authorities must be notified when a vehicle weighing more than 44 tonnes is intended to be used on the public highway because many bridges are unsuitable for such loads.

Second, the probability that a bridge component will fail can be reduced, for example by strengthening piers and through regular inspections. Strengthening components is conceptually straightforward. However, it is often hard to judge what magnitude of load to design against, considering the unpredictability of extreme events over the lifetime of a bridge. Research on future climate trends would improve those assumptions. Besides inspections, sensors can also be installed on bridges to detect the early stages of damage, allowing prompt repairs before component failure.

Third, engineers can prevent the propagation of failures by improving connectivity between components so that loads carried by failed components can be redistributed over the rest of the structure¹²^,¹³. Engineers need to better understand how loads would be redistributed for a wider range of bridge types.

The world must rethink plans for ageing oil and gas platforms

Thankfully, the range of sensors and algorithms available for bridge monitoring has expanded greatly in recent years — as have markets for such systems, which are predicted to grow at an annual rate of 12% globally until 2033 (see go.nature.com/3wdjvmn). Ultrasound or ground-penetrating radar can be used to test material properties and to uncover defects and damages¹⁴. Fibre-optic sensors can monitor bridge vibrations and deformations¹⁵. And temperature and humidity sensors can acquire data on environmental and operational conditions.

Research on identifying early damage is mature¹⁶. But it’s harder to extrapolate from data to anticipate events that can trigger catastrophic failure. This requires computational simulations of possible failure scenarios — such as those being performed in the Pont3 project that we are currently working on. Such tools will help engineers to identify the most likely failure points and key parameters for monitoring, and to define optimal sensor locations to collect the maximum information with minimum resources.

Regulations will also be needed for bridge monitoring systems, which are currently deployed in an ad hoc way. And more must be done to develop automated and user-friendly processes for analysing monitoring data, which remain highly specialized. Researchers must collaborate with the bridge industry to make such practices more mainstream.

Learn from other sectors

Policymakers and the bridge industry should learn from sectors with stringent safety requirements, including the aviation and automobile industries. For instance, whereas a typical car is equipped with more than 100 sensors, and passenger aeroplanes have up to 10,000, most bridges are not monitored at all.

The installation and maintenance of monitoring systems are standardized and regulated in these other sectors; procedures and tools are optimized and tailored to the needs of the industry. Safety certification and inspection protocols for cars and planes are also well harmonized internationally, and the majority of professionals working in these industries are conscious of the importance of these measures. The bridge industry has a long way to go before attaining this level of regulation and clarity.

Overcoming these challenges collaboratively would help to reduce the risk of catastrophic collapse of bridges to a level that is as low as reasonably practicable. Safeguarding our bridges will help to build a resilient society in the face of an uncertain future.

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May 28, 2024
Tackling ‘wicked’ problems calls for engineers with social responsibility

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In the nineteenth century, steamboat explosions were common — until they weren’t.Credit: Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty

Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World Guru Madhavan W. W. Norton & Company (2024)

Society relies on engineers to deliver almost everything it uses, from food and water to buildings, transport and telecommunications. But new technologies are often rushed into service, for market reasons, before potential risks and consumer behaviours are understood, and well before sufficient regulation is put in place to protect the public.

Calling all engineers: Nature wants to publish your research

In Wicked Problems, biomedical engineer and US policy adviser Guru Madhavan considers the implications of these human-made vulnerabilities using striking stories — such as a tsunami of molasses, aeroplane crashes, exploding steamships and infants decapitated by airbags. By exploring the interplay between engineers and policymakers, Madhavan shows how engineering can produce problems that policy cannot fix, and how successful systems can create socially unacceptable risks.

Madhavan focuses on ‘wicked problems’, which emerge “when hard, soft and messy problems collide”. Time and time again, a technology becomes profitable and is widely adopted, then its problems become clear and public alarm grows. A period of debate follows, marked by inflamed emotions, news coverage, litigation, denial of responsibility and political impotence. Eventually, corrective mechanisms are developed, implemented and enforced with updated standards. These patterns and problems of rapid technological development are becoming recognized. And there are plenty of modern examples, from social-media platforms and artificial-intelligence systems to self-driving cars.

Deep dive into disasters

There’s much that can be learnt from history, Madhavan tells us. Take the lucrative business of supplying molasses for whisky and food manufacturing, for example. A massive storage tank built in 1915 in Boston, Massachusetts, had exhibited so many signs of being unsafe that the company managers and workers grew accustomed to the leaks and stress groans. One day in 1919, the tank, filled to capacity, ruptured, sending 10.5 million litres of syrup through the streets in a 10-metre-high surge, destroying buildings, killing 21 people and injuring 150.

In the wake of the molasses disaster, the industry rushed to improve the safety of both ‘hard’, physical infrastructure and ‘soft’ operational standards. Risks and vulnerabilities were assessed, better materials were engineered, designs were improved on and safety and maintenance measures were implemented to reduce the risk of pressure-vessel explosions and collapses.

Warning signs were ignored in the lead-up to the 1919 Boston Molasses Disaster.Credit: Science History Images/Alamy

But why was it normal to accept vulnerability — why did workers and managers ignore the warning signs? A social-responsibility code was needed to tackle the soft problems of human error and risk normalization, as well as the vague problems of greed, mismanagement and hubris. Had such a code existed, it would also have spoken to the ‘messy’ problem of colonial exploitation in sugar-cane-exporting countries. Madhavan brings attention to the need for engineers to take on social responsibility.

The world must rethink plans for ageing oil and gas platforms

Madhavan explores six facets of wicked problems — efficiency, vagueness (about the nature of the problem), vulnerability, safety, maintenance and resilience. Risks are impossible to eliminate, but they can be diminished through ‘mindful’ processes (in which workers have time to run through checklists and identify hazards), workplace cultures of humility and continuous learning, and robust, responsive work structures, such as whiteboards on which issues can be recorded, with processes to stop work to check and report errors.

Systems-safety engineer Nancy Leveson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, for example, strives to account for social and cultural behaviours in her work. She has studied steam-boiler explosions, which are rare today but were commonplace a century ago. Of course, high-pressure-steam science and pressure-vessels engineering have improved since then — but Leveson points out that the real transition has been in culture. These explosions went from being a tragedy to being unacceptable.

The Wright stuff

Aviation provides a fertile ground for the study of such disasters, and Madhavan makes ample use of examples from this sector. In 1903, aeroplane inventor Orville Wright took on the risks of flying alone; within a decade, he was flying with paying customers. The book goes deep into the 121-year history of aircraft, flight simulators, airmail, navigation technologies, air-traffic management and government interventions. It recounts the early challenges of flying and navigating, and the risk-taking culture that was particularly common among pilots in the first three decades of aviation — resulting in a number of accidents. Flying was so unsafe in the 1960s that in the United States, only one in five people was willing to fly.

Madhavan threads the story of US aviation pioneer Edwin Link throughout the book to explore how a systems approach is needed to address wicked problems. As well as being a pilot, Link was an inventor, entrepreneur and adventurer with a strong sense of responsibility. I was awarded a Link Foundation Energy Fellowship during my PhD studies. The scholarship application asked candidates to discuss how their vision for research was guided by social responsibility — now I know why.

Practice in Edwin Link’s Blue box provided pilots with physical and mental training.Credit: Jon G. Fuller/VWPics/Alamy

Link devised a flight simulator, known as the Blue Box, in which trainees gain experience with the flight deck and the controls and get a feel for different manoeuvres. Importantly, beyond technical skills, he organized the training experience around the mental discipline of the pilot. He understood that ‘blind flight’ — when pilots lose visibility of the horizon and landmarks — often led to a catastrophic loss of control because pilots relied too much on their senses instead of on the plane’s instruments. Confining pilots in the Blue Box without visual cues taught them how to trust the altitude, heading and horizontal situation indicators.

Similarly, Madhavan champions the importance of looking at seemingly technical problems through a wider lens — such as the business, policy and social aspects. He makes the case for investing in engineering-research programmes to develop the holistic approaches and methods needed to address wicked problems. He also calls for the field of engineering to expand beyond its typical role of fostering economic growth through technical innovation and take on the political and social aspects of industrial development. Examples include the Endicott-Johnson Shoes Company, then based in Binghamton, New York, which, in the 1910s, started building affordable houses for its workers and reduced their workday from ten to eight hours.

Wicked Problems is a wake-up call for all engineers to expand their mindset. Although I wish that Madhavan’s book had gone a step further, to lay out how us engineers could do that, it does provide a background and argument to pivot our current risky, if successful, endeavours towards safer systems.

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May 27, 2024
Laser-powered bullets reveal surprising metal hardness

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Conventional thinking suggests that metals soften as they warm. But this isn’t always true, as researchers have succeeded in demonstrating that under extreme conditions, metals actually get harder as they get hotter.

Read the paper here: Metals strengthen with increasing temperature at extreme strain rates

By shooting metal targets with tiny, laser-powered projectiles, this team was able to create incredibly high strain rates. Under these conditions a property called drag strengthening comes into play giving rise to metals that behave in counterintuitive ways, and could inform high speed manufacture or aerospace engineering.

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May 22, 2024
Combined cement and steel recycling could cut CO2 emissions

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Fabio Pulizzi 00:10

Hello, this is How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a podcast brought to you by Nature Careers in partnership with Nature Water. I’m Fabio Pulizzi, chief editor of Nature Water.

Welcome again to the series where we meet the scientists working towards the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by the United Nations and world leaders in 2015.

For almost a decade, in a huge global effort, thousands of researchers have been using those targets to tackle the biggest problems that the planet faces today.

In episode 9, we look at Sustainable Development Goal number 9: infrastructure, industrialization and innovation.

And we meet an electrical engineer who sees efficient energy provision as central to a country meeting these aims.

Sinan Küfeoğlu: 01:02

I am Sinan Küfeoğlu. I am working as a senior policy manager at the UK Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, OFGEM.

Previously I worked at Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, Alto University in Finland, on various energy, economics and policy-related subjects.

I’d like to clarify that the perspectives I express are my own as a researcher, and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official or unofficial stances or views of OFGEM, or the UK civil service.

Goal number 9 is about building a resilient infrastructure and promoting sustainable industrialization and fostering innovation.

So it has kind of three pillars: ifrastructure, industrialization and innovation.

For the infrastructure in SDG number nine, the three main themes are to provide transportation, information and communication infrastructures.

So these are the enablers for a sustainable development in industrialization and innovation.

You know, without transport, without information, and without communication, we can’t enable economic activity, industry and innovation.

So these are the main pillars picked up by the SDG number 9.

I’m originally from Turkey. When I was a little child, Isaac Newton was my hero. That is why I was quite interested in physics. That was my favourite topic in the school.

And when I started university in Ankara, in the Middle East Technical University, I wanted to study electrical engineering, just to continue all this. Faraday’s works, Maxwell’s work, you know, I started being more and more interested in this electricity and energy fields.

At the age of 14, I gave a seminar on the the importance and future of nuclear energy to the city representatives in my city in Turkey.

So I was quite interested in energy related subjects. That’s why I studied electrical engineering in Turkey.

Then, I wanted to do research and get into academia. That is why I moved to Finland to do my Masters and PhD, again in electrical engineering.

But when I finished my PhD, I said: “Okay, this is a time for a bigger challenge to see, you know, to be exposed to the outer world.”

Because Finland is more of a reserved place. You know, well, it’s a happy country. Yeah, everyone, let’s say in my university, Aalto University, we were all electrical engineers.

Imagine a corridor. Forty people, they’re all electrical engineers, and they look at the world from the same perspective, from the same window.

So I wanted to change that, to expose myself for differences and different, you know, problems, peoples, backgrounds.

That’s why I moved to UK. And in Cambridge, I found exactly that sort of environment. I, for example, from this school of electrical engineering, I moved to business school, in Cambridge.

So in there I worked with business people, finance people, people from sciences, humanities, backgrounds, any backgrounds.

And I started working with companies, industry, the public authorities, the companies from all around the world, and getting questions from them. You know, a company approaches you and says: “Okay, we have this problem. Can you do research for us?”

I say, “Okay, yeah, we can do this. And we need these skills and experiences.”

They fund us. They go around our network, find the necessary skills. Altogether truly interdisciplinary research. We come up with answers. And we publish our answers. In a short time period, we can see the real impact in the world. And that is what motivates me the most, to see the impact what I do, what I publish in the end.

After that, I experienced the same thing in Oxford, now with the World Bank, EBRD, OFGEM, the civil service, we do regulations of policymaking, and everything we do, whatever we change, immediately, the next day, there’s enough impact in the orders of hundreds of millions, even billions of pounds.

So this is quite, you know, tempting and motivating. And energy is the enabler of everything.

Sinan Küfeoğlu 05:54

The biggest infrastructure challenge, I think, as a power engineer, I can say the access to electricity, the power network.

Because power network, in my opinion, is the biggest engineering achievement of humankind to this date, because it enables other sectors and other economies to continue.

And five, seven years ago, in Cambridge, we published a paper on the future of power distribution in the world, and investigated what parts of the world has access to continuous power, what kind of netoworks they have.

So around 1 billion people in the world right now lack continuous power access.

And the concentration of these people are mainly in the Global South. So there is an equality problem as well, as well as technical problems of accessing electricity.

So in my opinion, this is the biggest challenge to provide electricity to everyone, so that they will have an economy, they can create jobs and businesses and they can sustain their more than social lives.

In addition to electric power, I can say, access to clean water and sanitation is another infrastructure problem.

Because it is necessary to, as I said, sustain daily lives of, you know, dignified human beings. And again, this concentration of lacking access to clean water and sanitation is almost geographically the same with the lack of access to power.

So these two are going you know, side by side, I think, in terms of challenges.

So solving one will naturally solve the other I guess, if the necessary actions are taken. As SDG number 9 reminds me of transportation, it says information and telecommunications.

But transportation wise, I think the world is at okayish levels. So we can connect and travel to all, to even the remotest areas in the world.

It is fine, I think. Information, well it comes to telecommunications and internet. Yes, we should just distribute the Internet to all regions in the world.

Some companies, you know, are doing this, some widespread big projects that are promising that anyone on Earth can access to internet. I hope that will work out.

In terms of telecommunications, 2G network is almost everywhere on Earth. But the adoption of 4G is slower and 5G is much lower. I’m sure those will increase in time as well, as we achieve 2G.

So, you know, information and telecommunications are okayish in terms of when you compare with other problems in the infrastructure.

Sinan Küfeoğlu 09:03

When we talk about infrastructure, everyone thinks of investments. What would happen in the future? What we should do more to add on top of the existing one. But people tend to miss the thing that the existing infrastructure is aging as well.

For example, in the energy network, the usual lifetime of you know, equipment is around like 50-60 years, if you’re lucky, 70 depending on the quality of the manufacturing.

So replacing the existing infrastructure, the aging infrastructure, is another big challenge. I remember back in the day, we went to a factory in Turkey. I was in the university there.

And they wanted to change the electricity infrastructure to a new one, to a smarter one, you know, Smart Grid, Smart Energy Systems.

Yep. Popular ones, Let’s do that. So that was the year 2010. We went to that factory. And I saw that the equipment for installed back in 1920s.

They were German-made, still working after 90 years, you see. But they had to be replaced maybe after 60 years. So they made it to 90 years. So these are huge costs, you see.

Sinan Küfeoğlu 10:22

In the developed world, while the infrastructure is ageing, and it needs to be replaced, this is the biggest challenge.

And the industry, it’s transforming into, you know, more digitalized, more green industries, more sustainable.

Whereas in the developing countries, they still lack businesses infrastructure. So basic infrastructure should go there first.

I remember back in the day, we had a chat with the retired senior officer of one of the biggest oil companies in the world.

I asked him a question said that, you know, he gave a speech about sustainability. Imagine an oil company former CEO talking about sustainability. That’s a bit ironic. I said, “Okay, you say were going to create a sustainable world in the in the future.” And I said, “In that sustainable world, there is no place for you, you know, oil companies. What are you going to do in terms of business.”

And he laughed at that bit and said, “I understand your enthusiasm, young man, but about a billion people lack energy right now in the world. And we are the first ones, the oil and gas companies, to reach these people before the electricity goes to them.”

So you know, the industrialization, the needs, they change rapid, vary widely between geographies. I think when we talk about the challenges the solutions, we should we should address what we’re talking about and where we’re talking about.

Sinan Küfeoğlu 12:00

So, the solution for this industrialization challenge, the practical and sensible solution, would be to provide decentralized and smart systems to the developing countries, and less developed countries.

For example, these solar systems, you know, solar PV systems, together with energy storage assets, and clean water and sanitation assets, they could be deployed, so that these regions will have the sufficient amount of basic infrastructure to run their daily errands.

And these self-sufficient mini and micro infrastructure could be a solution in these underdeveloped regions.

As long as financing mechanisms exist and provided to these regions, that’s another problem. We know financing mechanisms. For the developed world the challenge is digitalization and ageing infrastructure.

So in one hand, we are going to incorporate more digital solutions. In the other we are going to green it by decarbonizing it. In the meantime, of course, we will replace the ageing infrastructure with the new ones.

Sinan Küfeoğlu 13:24

We had this kind of a trend, maybe 20 years ago, saying that, “Okay, let’s decentralize everything, our energy systems. Why not go for micro grids, mini grids, self sustaining cities, self sustaining university campuses? Everything should be self sufficient.”

You have self-sufficient homes. These ideas emerged everywhere in the world. So we wanted to decentralize these power systems, for example. But after 20 years, two decades, when we see now that we are creating more bigger, gigantic centralized entities, rather than decentralization.

For example, it happened in the UK 20 years ago, when we’re talking about mini grids, micro grids right now, we are creating this future energy system, future system operator.

So it’s going to be bigger, heavier in terms of physics, and more, you know, authorities and technical capabilities will be concentrated on the centralized entity.

So everything is going for centralized entities. So that’s, that’s a kind of a big irony in the developed world. I think. that should be mentioned here.

Sinan Küfeoğlu 14:39

There are various innovation challenges. First, we can mention of this research and development expenditure.

Again, there’s this inequality in the developed world. The, you know, a higher percentage of GDP is being spent for research and development.

Whereas in developing countries it is almost half of that, or maybe lower than half of that.

Similarly, the number of researchers and academic activities in the developed world is much, much, much higher than the developing countries.

So that means that the gap in between is going to get larger, bigger, when time passes. So, when we, you know announced these SDGs, back in 2015, the main idea was to support, you know, these developing countries so that there’ll be more research and development innovation activities, so that the gap would be smaller.

But the numbers tell us exactly a different opposite way. So, more research and development activities are concentrated in the developed world, less in the developing world.

The other thing, in innovation, I think we should mention something really, really important here is the viability of innovation. Because the countries are, you know, funding the research work. Projects are the projects, and everything.

What I’ve witnessed in my professional career, I’ve been quite active in Brussels back in the day, attending, you know, European Commission meetings about funding announcements, all these you know, Horizon projects etc.

In many chats, I realized that they don’t run proper return-on-investment analysis, cost-benefit analysis. So in the developed world, I can say that the biggest challenge with innovation is that people tend to use these buzzwords.

What are these buzzwords? Green, stainable, holistic approach, inclusive, circular economy. So as long as you bombard your research proposal, or, you know, innovation proposal with these words, you can easily sell it to people, to the funding authorities.

And those authorities don’t measure the impact after that. Imagine, you propose a research project of five years, and you’re funded less than 100 million euros.

And after five years, no one is asking how much of value you created. So how much of this money returned back to the society, returned back to the economies?

And I can give you two solid examples about this innovation challenge. The first one could be blockchain.

Five years ago, it was the biggest hype in the world, especially in the energy world. Everyone said, “Oh, it’s gonna decarbonize the whole world.”

We will say it. Blockchain is the hero. And many countries, primarily Germany, invested a huge amount of money in this in the sphere, funded projects, companies, startups.

But after five years, now we can see that most of those companies failed. They perished from the business world.

They couldn’t create any real value. They couldn’t create revenue streams. And what happened to those fundings? They are just gone, you see. Right now the similar thing is happening with hydrogen, similar big hype, it’s going to decarbonize everything.

You’re going to achieve net zero through hydrogen, and billions of euros are being spent everywhere, in North America, in Europe, even in Britain. But no one is actually, you know, asking the question: “How much of this money is going to return back to the economies also societies as real real value?“

So I think in terms of innovation, when we talk about innovation, we should really highlight and underscore the term viability.

The SDGs are not solid or binding targets. Rather, these are accumulation of numerous recommendations and roadmaps. And so we don’t have to achieve any solid targets by 2030.

They’re not binding, or legally binding. So these are recommendations. But when we asked the questions, “Will we achieve SDG number nine by 2030? The answer is yes and no. Both.”

Because some parts of the world you know, we already talked about the inequalities, you know the geographical differences, they’re going to achieve it maybe some pas have already achieved this, you know, SDG number nine target sub targets, there are various sub targets in there, but some other parts of the world may be they will never achieve it.

What I can say from my kind of professional experience, the ship has already set sail. These SDG ships in particular as SDG number nine, yep, it’s traveling now.

And it has a direction and ultimate kind of target It’s going there. But the main question is who is traveling in the first class, and who is traveling below the deck below the engines, below the sea level.

So some peoples are traveling first class, some people just below the engine rooms. So that is the problem because after all, I’m an engineer, and I believe in science and engineering and I really, really believe in the potential in mankind.

I definitely think that that we are going to achieve these climate goals, the sustainable development goals one way or another, maybe in 2030, maybe in 2050.

But eventually, we will achieve these, but it’s not going to be an equal journey for everybody.

Fabil Pulizzi 21:06

Thanks for listening to this series: How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals.

Join us again next time when we look at Sustainable Development Goal number 10: to reduce inequality in and among countries. See you then

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