World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development: iGEM and the SDGs
by Linda Kahl
March 4th is World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development. In honor of this day, we’d like to highlight the accomplishments of iGEM teams engineering biological solutions for global challenges as articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“There’s a set of critical world problems: water, food, energy, pollution and, as we are seeing increasingly today, health. All of these are problems that are directly amenable to biology as potential solutions. I hope that you will be the people who go and solve some of these critical world problems, these sustainable development goals, and lead us into a better future.”
The SDGs are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. Last year, iGEM introduced the SDGs as a focus for collaboration that teams could continue to build upon in future years. By coordinating iGEM projects across years, across boundaries, and across disciplines, iGEMers are working to solve the environmental, social, and economic challenges of the world.
Together with iGEM partner Just One Giant Lab (JOGL), the iGEM 2020 teams collaborated with one another around four challenges, each addressing specific categories of the SDGs:
Fundamental Needs - Goals 2, 3 and 6,
Socio-Economic Needs - Goals, 1, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16 and 17,
The Environment - Goals, 13, 14 and 15 and
Industrial Needs - Goals 7, 9 and 12.
By hosting projects addressing similar SDGs under a single umbrella, the iGEM 2020 program on JOGL fostered efficient collaboration across iGEM teams, and enhanced their ability to access the skills and resources needed to have an impact on the world.
“We want to diversify the number of problems we can work on together as a humanity, where everything that is being produced can be reused and is openly accessible for the greater good. Imagine if you have millions of people collaborating with each other, the number of problems you’d be able to target and solve would be enormous.”
For the first time in 2020, a special prize for Best Sustainable Development Impact was awarded to iGEM teams demonstrating excellence in developing solutions addressing challenges of the SDGs. And the nominees and winners were:
Undergraduate
Winner:
Fudan (China) for designing a biological system to improve the health and quality of life for seniors suffering from osteoporosis.
Nominee:
Calgary (Canada) for developing “Ovita”, an engineered biosensor and supplement to address Vitamin A deficiency, the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness and mortality.
Nominee:
Toulouse_INSA-UPS (France) for creating “iGEMINI”, an engineered nutritional yeast co-culture for food supplementation for astronauts during space exploration missions.
Overgraduate
Winner:
TU_Darmstadt (Germany) for developing “B-TOX”, a B. subtilis biofilm for wastewater treatment that contributes to the responsible and sustainable use of water.
Nominee:
TUDelft (Netherlands) for engineering “PHOCUS”, a targeted bacteriophage-based biopesticide to control the desert locust crisis.
High School Division
Winner:
Lambert_GA (United States) for creating “AgroSENSE”, a biological system that enables sustainable cities and communities by providing a solution for food production in urban areas with limited arable land.
We appreciate and congratulate all of the iGEM teams that worked towards the SDGs in 2020!
The iGEM community has the responsibility and innovation potential to develop solutions for global challenges, and the SDGs will remain a focus for iGEM in the future. We can’t wait to see how the iGEM 2021 teams will build upon the foundations laid by previous iGEM teams in further developing solutions for the challenges of the SDGs!
This blog article was updated April 5, 2021 to add project promotion videos from the iGEM Video Universe.
