EFC06 - Bjorn Lomborg on prioritizing the world's problems

Running notes from the second European Futurists Conference in Lucerne (Switzerland).

Bjorn Lomborg is the closing keynote speaker. In the "Skeptical environmentalist" book, which made his name a few years ago, he argued that the environmental crisis has been largely exaggerated by environmentalists and that the real outlook is rosier than generally acknowledged. The man, to say the least, is controversial.

In 2004 he launched the Copenhagen Consensus, an attempt to prioritize the world's problems and the spending that goes towards trying to solve them. "In an ideal world, we would solve all of the world's problems - climate challenge, hunger, conflicts, water, public health, education, migrations, etc - but the reality is that our resources are limited, and we are not solving them". So "we have the moral obligation to invest our resources where they can have the highest impact”. The Copenhagen Consensus is based on this idea: asking a question such as "If you had USD50 billion to do good, what would you do first?" and try to prioritize.

He invited economists, specialists on each of ten challenge areas, to Copenhagen to collectively do an informed cost-benefit analysis, and set priorities (The results of the exercise are summarized in his new book, "How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place", and the exercise will be repeated in 2008). Why economists? Wouldn't a climatologist know better about climate change? "Yes, but economists know how to prioritize scarce resources". Why only USD50 billion? "The size of the wallet doesn't change the method". Aren't you comparing apples and oranges (migrations and climate change)? "Yes, but our resources are limited so we need to do these choices".

So where would those scarce resources, according to Lomborg's panel of economists, yield the highest results? In fighting HIV/AIDS (picture from Unesco). He says that 28 million cases could be alleviated by 2017 at a cost of 27 billion USD, with 40-fold benefits from preventing the spreading of the disease. The next three top priorities in his list: malnutrition; trade liberalization; water sanitation. At the end of the list is climate change: "there is little that we can do; and at a very high cost". Education did not make it into the list.

The exercise was repeated with a group of youngsters (priorities: malnutrition and diseases), with Africans (malnutrition and diseases), and with UN ambassadors (diseases, malnutrition, clean water): there is some consistency.

Needless to say, these results got significant criticism. Lomborg stands his ground. "The effects of climate change will play out towards the end of this century and into the next: why are we so willing to help people in 100 years and unwilling to help poor people today?" His answer is that "climate change feels more important because it operates on hundred years scales - while other challenges are shorter-term - and it works with worst-case analysis". He suggests that we should therefore make 100-years scenarios also for other major issues such as HIV and malnutrition, and this would create a competition of good ideas for solving the world's problems. "We should stop doing things that don't fix anything or that do little good at high cost, and focus on things that do a lot of good, now, cheaply".