Bancroft Global Development

Engineering faces a future of many risks and opportunities.  One risk is we are living through a period of global climate change.  Regardless of the causes, the experience of history (namely the 17th century) shows that long-term turbulence and unreliability of the weather inevitability produces calamitous outcomes for humanity.  Engineers will be on the front lines of these new battles; climate-related catastrophes such as drought and flooding, harvest failure and enforced migration will produce civil unrest, conflict, disease and destruction which will concentrate our efforts on massive global resiliency and redevelopment that has never been seen in human history.

All the problems mentioned above require large coalitions of states to commit to sophisticated, long-term collective action and global problem solving.  But the recent failures of major multilateral negotiations on trade and climate change have not generated much optimism.  The most negative view of our climate change future will have stable governments failing and commerce fatally disrupted.  Many experts are advocating for a new path forward that eschews new global institutions in favor of informal networks that bring governments, private groups, and experts together to form new coalitions with the goal of developing remedies for a world of climate change and catastrophes.

One example of a firm that could potentially operate in this new world of risk and opportunity is Bancroft Global Development.  The firm has an unusual business plan - - war-zone real estate development.  Their current focus is development opportunities in Somalia and Afghanistan.  Unpredictability always is a source of opportunity - - and nothing is going to be more unpredictable than the weather this century.  Organizations like the United Nations are and will increasingly be incapable of managing the instabilities created by climate change and global interdependency's.  Firms like Bancroft will start to fill a void - - from security stabilization and relief efforts (Bancroft also  does everything from counterinsurgency tactics to bomb disposal, sniper training, and road building) to redevelopment of areas impacted by our coming global crisis.

Engineering must start to think and execute more in terms of the informal versus the historic formal organization structures and less government/institutional response in times of crisis and more in terms of public-private partnerships, networks, and connections.