The Copenhagen Consensus

The Copenhagen Consensus project was organised by Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. It's goals are to establish priorities among a series of proposals for advancing global welfare. more info here.

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Environmental Assessment Institute and is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108371309817402165,00.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

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Problems, Problems

By BJORN LOMBORG
May 5, 2004

Spend half an hour shopping, and you quickly realize that all of us make priorities -- every day. Few of us are lucky enough to be able to afford everything, so we must weigh choices: new shoes, or a night out? A holiday, or tires for the car? On a larger scale, politicians make public policy priorities. Is raising literacy rates the highest priority, or should fixing the health system be paramount? No dollar can be spent twice.

Strangely, this basic concept has been almost absent in debate about one of the most important choices the world makes: how we spend money designed to improve living standards around the globe. This money is most obvious in overseas development and aid spending, but is also achieved through trade policies, the funding of research into diseases, investment in environmental protection, peacekeeping missions and maintaining the U.N. apparatus.

The cash has often tended to follow the public's attention from disaster to catastrophe -- indeed, the "cause of the hour" changes as fast as the media can set up cameras in another hotspot. Today's fears about climate change are yesterday's concerns about overpopulation, and tomorrow's outcry for a response to famine.

The U.N. has adopted Millennium Development Goals -- a collection of worthy initiatives. But unfortunately, they are unprioritized. Of course, we'd like to do all of them; it is vital to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, and we know we must reduce child mortality and improve maternal health. But if you or I were the elected leader of a small nation with just $5 million to spare for such projects, where should we spend our money first? Should we spread it around all of the goals, or would we achieve more if we spent most of it on just one initiative? Even if the world had much more than that to spend -- say, $50 billion -- how do we know where to direct the bulk of it?

Some say it is impossible to prioritize such worthy endeavors -- that every dollar used to "do some good" is a dollar well spent. But how wise is it to take this laissez-faire approach when we don't have money for everything? Consider cash-strapped shoppers at the grocery store. They scour the aisles, comparing different items. If they could get four family meals out of a single product, why would they spend the same money on an item that will only feed the family once?

Opponents believe that it is distasteful to prioritize this major spending, and that the result of any effort would be that some areas miss out entirely. Roger Riddell of Christian Aid has pointed out that there is little chance of effective use of money in southern Sudan, for example. Yet, he argues, help to Sudan "should not be abandoned." I don't know whether his pessimistic view of southern Sudan is justified -- and I certainly don't argue that relief efforts there should be abandoned. But on the broader point, we must ask ourselves: If there are some places where we can do relatively little, should we not consider achieving more elsewhere?

In an ideal world, we would have the money and the political capital to do everything. We would be able to end malnutrition, illiteracy and refugee problems, halt climate change, stop global conflicts, and wipe out corruption. But we live in the real world, where we must focus our efforts to achieve even some of these things. We have a stark choice. We can continue to prioritize without acknowledging that we are doing it. Or, we can work out a rational framework for our spending that makes some more sense.

This is exactly the aim of Copenhagen Consensus, a project that will bring nine of the world's top economists to Denmark later this month. The expert panel -- including four Nobel Laureates -- will create a prioritized list of opportunities to solve the 10 greatest challenges facing humanity, as we see them. The economists will examine the costs and benefits of solutions to each challenge. An example of a solution (to the challenge of communicable diseases) could be to provide free mosquito nets to areas affected by malaria. The result will be perhaps the grandest "To Do" list the world has seen, showing us how to spend our money the most efficiently. The list will be concrete, outlining tangible opportunities that can be done today.

The Copenhagen Consensus may not make every decision-maker snap to attention and change spending habits immediately. But it will give us the information we need to make our choices more rationally. Most importantly, it will place debate over the prioritization of our resources firmly on the agenda, making it possible not just to do some good in the world, but to do the best that we possibly can.

 

he's not talking about envronmentalism per se, but rather how to prioritize finite resources to better address the broad array of problems facing the world. of course, you'd have had to read the article to realize that, rather than just look at the name of the author.

 

read it. the article is not making a particular arguement about environmentalism or any other issue, merely suggesting (and this is the point of the whole project) that the world might make more efficient use of limited financial resources when tackling "intractable" problems.

 

financial resources.