Breakthrough: The Promise of Frontier Technologies for Sustainable Development (The Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Homi Kharas is a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at The Brookings Institution. He studies politics and trends influencing developing countries, including aid to poor countries, the emergence of the middle class, and global governance and the G20.

John W. McArthur is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. He co-founded and co-chairs the 17 Rooms initiative, an innovative approach to catalyzing ideas and action for the Sustainable Development Goals.

Izumi Ohno is a Professor at the NationalGraduate Institute for Policy Studies in Japan, and a Senior Research Adviserto the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Ogata Sadako ResearchInstitute for Peace and Development. She specializes in internationaldevelopment policy, industrial policy and Japanese development cooperation. Herprevious books include Industrial Human Resource Development in DevelopingCountries: Knowledge and Skills in the Era of SDGs.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The COVID-19 pandemic offered many lessons for the world, one of the most important of which is the role of technology in solving seemingly intractable problems. A breakthrough technology led to the development of vaccines against COVID-19 in record time, helping slow a pandemic that has led to at least 5 million premature deaths and caused untold misery worldwide.

In Breakthrough, more than a dozen distinguished international experts examine the potential for similar technological breakthroughs to affect the human condition and natural world within the next ten years. Their stories reflect major ambitions for what the future could bring and offer a glimpse into the possibilities for achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The authors were asked to envision future success in their respective fields, given the current state of technology and potential progress over the next decade. Each examined technological advances that could contribute directly to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people or a substantial segment of the planet.

The book’s chapters cover a wide range of problems and potential technological solutions in such fields as medicine, agriculture, energy, finance, and nature conservation.

Each chapter in the book reflects major opportunities for humanity. These are not predictions for what will happen but are informed conjectures about what could happen if leaders make the right choices to promote the right circumstances. Technological advances will not solve all of the world’s problems; better public policies and more community-minded politics are vital in every society. But technology must play a crucial role in smoothing the path toward better sustainable development outcomes.

Breakthrough is a major contribution to public understanding of how that can happen.