COMMENT
The Copenhagen Consensus will help save lives
By BJORN LOMBORG

24 May 2004
Financial Times

(c) 2004 The Financial Times Limited. All rights reserved

Imagine if doctors at a perpetually overrun hospital refused to perform triage on casualties but instead attended to patients as they arrived, fast-tracking those whose families made the most fuss. The approach would be unjust; it would waste resources and cost lives. Yet this is what we seem to accept when it comes to helping the world's most disadvantaged people.

We spend billions of dollars each year in an effort to improve life for those in need. This is most obvious through overseas development and aid, but is also achieved through trade policies, funding of medical research, investment in environmental protection, peacekeeping missions and the entire United Nations apparatus.

The problem is that we lack clear priorities. Too often spending decisions appear to follow the media's shifting spotlight or politicians' domestic interests. We do prioritise - no dollar can be spent twice - yet we do so implicitly rather than explicitly, and with no rational basis.

Providing a method for prioritisation is the goal of the Copenhagen Consensus. This week nine leading economists - including several Nobel laureates - are meeting in Denmark to answer the question: of all the threats confronting humanity, where could we do the most good?

The economists will focus on 10 of the greatest tests facing the world, ranging from financial instability and climate change to communicable diseases and hunger. Eminent scholars have prepared evaluations of solutions to each.

Thus, on communicable diseases, the economists will explore the costs and benefits of a localised approach to combating malaria, which could halve its incidence in sub-Saharan Africa by 2015. Then they will look at a strategy to combat HIV/Aids that could avert 30m cases by 2010. Is either option a higher priority than implementing the Kyoto protocol, one solution to the challenge of climate change? How can anybody attempt to make such a choice? The truth is that we already do so, but without acknowledging it.

In an ideal world we would not need to prioritise. We could simultaneously improve sanitation, end conflicts, global warming and malnutrition and win the war against communicable diseases. But our resources are limited. Explicit prioritisation does not mean dismissing a problem as unimportant or unsalvageable; it means using careful analysis to determine where we should focus our immediate attention.

Some critics claim the approach would create winners and losers. In Nature magazine Roger Riddell, international director of Christian Aid, the London-based charity, asked what would happen to the people of southern Sudan. "There is little chance of effective use of money there. But (the region) should not be abandoned," he said.

I would certainly not argue that the region's inhabitants should be "abandoned". But I would challenge such critics to explain why we should spend a large amount of our limited resources to achieve relatively little, when we could make a much larger difference elsewhere. We must strive to have a rational basis for every dollar spent.

This solution has been called simplistic - most recently on these pages on May 15, where it was accused of embodying a falsely reductive "command-and-control" view of the world's problems. It is indeed true that these are vast and interrelated. In many countries we cannot improve education without providing decent infrastructure and eliminating corruption and conflict. But the Copenhagen Consensus takes this into consideration by exploring how challenges and their solutions will interact.

We must ask ourselves whether limited success is better than no success at all. Should we not seek to accomplish the most good that we can, even if it is limited? While there is no simple solution to any of the world's challenges, a rational basis for setting priorities is surely better than none at all. Those who defend the status quo are arguing against a search for better information to shape our decisions.

After 2004 the Copenhagen Consensus will be held every four years. The highest-ranked problems and solutions will change, but the aim will remain constant, and so will the belief that - just as in the hospital's emergency clinic - a better sense of priorities and high-quality information can help us save more lives.

The writer is the author of 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' and director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute and the Copenhagen Consensus Document FTFT000020040524e05o0002w