Innovation everywhere : computing for 9 billion people

The world’s population is expected to reach over 9 billion people by 2050. The FAO estimates that food production will need to increase by 50% on 2005 levels by 2030, and food price rises led to civil unrest in many countries in 2008. Many of the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) are unlikely to be met by the target year of 2015. The MDG progress report [5] notes that MDG 1 on halving world poverty had been ‘derailed’ by the recent economic crisis, with respect to MDG 5 of maternal health that “giving birth safely is largely a privilege of the rich”, whilst MDG 7 of global environmental sustainability suffered a serious setback with the lack of comprehensive agreement at the 2009 Copenhagen summit. The world faces serious challenges in security, health and climate change.

Computing, computing researchers and organization such as the British Computer Society & the Association for Computing Machinery could make a significant contribution to addressing these challenges. This paper presents a grand challenge of configuring technologies, research and organizations such that they can contribute to different futures for the climate, for global health, and security.