How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place

by Bjørn Lomborg

As I reported in the Slate series, new research for the project by John Hoddinott and colleagues of the International Food Policy Research Institute and Peter Orazem of Iowa State University focuses on an investment of $3 billion annually. This would purchase a bundle of interventions, including micronutrient provision, complementary foods, treatment for worms and diarrheal diseases, and behavior-change programs, all of which could reduce chronic undernutrition by 36 percent in developing countries. In total, such an investment would help more than 100 million children start their lives without stunted growth or malnourishment. And comprehensive research now shows that such interventions would stay with them for life: Their bodies and muscles would grow faster, their cognitive abilities would improve, and they would pay more attention in school (and stay there longer). Studies show that, decades down the line, these children would be more productive, make more money, have fewer kids, and begin a virtuous circle of dramatic development.

Check citation, lack of footnotes. What is perhaps underrated in terms of climate change is for developed countries its a priority, a privilege while developing countries still rely on archaic processes to function- they go through the same process to develop themselves ecoomically as we have. If we educate devloping countries such that they can develop the advanced morality that comes with developing nation I think this would be optimal. civilization started when there was a food surplus. Civil bodies were established when one person didn't have to farm or hunt for food, perhaps they became a wise chief, a priest or a proto scientist. Anyways, the same precedent follows for developing countries: take them out of the survival cycle so they can look towards more complex structures and arrangements, this is even more important for countries like africa that will be hit hard.

Likewise, just $300 million would prevent the deaths of 300,000 children, if it were used to strengthen the Global Fund’s malaria-financing mechanism, which makes combination therapies cheaper for poor countries.

Expanding tuberculosis treatment and childhood immunization coverage are two other health investments that the expert panel endorses. Likewise, a $100 million annual increase in spending to develop a vaccine against HIV/AIDS would generate substantial benefits in the future.

A vaccine against a retrovirus, given AIDS hasn't been successfully eradicated even in the western world- and $100 million will significantly change this? Big doubt.

The expert panel’s findings point to a compelling need to invest roughly $2 billion annually in research and development to increase agricultural output. Not only would this reduce hunger by increasing food production and lowering food prices; it would also protect biodiversity, because higher crop productivity would mean less deforestation. That, in turn, would help in the fight against climate change as well, because forests store carbon.

When it comes to the issue of climate change, the experts recommend spending a small amount—roughly $1 billion—to investigate the feasibility of cooling the planet through geoengineering options. This would allow us to understand better the technology’s risks, costs, and benefits. Moreover, the research could potentially give us low-cost, effective insurance against global warming.

Leidenfrost effect, co2 harvesters, reduce co2 and nitrogen emissions.

The idea behind Copenhagen Consensus is to render this process less arbitrary, and to provide more evidence upon which informed decisions can be made by politicians and others. We create a framework in which solutions to the world's biggest problems are prioritized explicitly, with the goal of achieving the most 'good' for people and the planet. Much of the time, society is presented with a menu of choices, but with very little information on their costs and benefits.

Prices arent considered. Yes, the earth is priceless but most of our priviledge is a product of climate change. Are we willing to stop eating meat, stop consuming fashion, stop consuming electricity? We aren't. So, if we are to be selfish to sustain those industries then we cannot demand climate change to be miraculously solved.

When it comes to global welfare projects, it is easy for decision-makers to pay lip service to prioritization, while behaving as though the pool of money is infinite, that all that is lacking is willpower, and that everything should be tackled all at once.

Some will argue that it is impossible to put a value on a human life. Yet, refusing to put a value on human life does not help to save lives. In practice, prioritization occurs every day in areas as disparate as health policy and infrastructure. When we decide on a national speed limit we are implicitly putting a price on human life, weighing the benefits of fewer lives lost with a lower speed limit against the dispersed costs of higher transport times.

In a research paper on education Peter Orazem highlights the different ways that decision-makers could approach the challenge of providing education in developing countries. Most children in developing countries are now already enrolled in school for at least some period, so Orazem points out that we could focus on strategies that improve school quality, either by enhancing the learning that is occurring in school or increasing the number of years of schooling. Unfortunately, there is very weak knowledge about which inputs actually generate quality schooling outcomes, and many investments are unlikely to generate the desired effects. There is widespread acknowledgement that resources are used inefficiently, but for instance efforts to improve resource management by devolving authority to local jurisdictions are as likely to fail as succeed. Thus, Orazem considers three strategies that seem to offer the best evidence of success to date: nutrition supplements, offering information on returns to schooling, and conditional cash transfers for school attendance. All have been shown to succeed with benefits that exceed the costs.

It may seem surprising to focus on nutrition to achieve better schooling, but malnourished children learn poorly. Ensuring proper nutrition when brain development is occurring makes a significant difference. The benefits are not just educational but also increase health and a child’s physical abilities (investment in deworming is recommended in the Copenhagen Consensus research on chronic disease, and nutritional interventions are promoted in the paper on hunger.) Provision of nutrient supplements and anti-parasitic medicines is very inexpensive: In Kenya the cost of deworming a child can be as low as $3.50, with benefits 20 to 50 times higher.

Benefits of nutrition

These programs—known as conditional cash transfers—have consistently increased child attendance, even when the transfer is modest. Administrative costs have been lower than those of other social interventions. In addition to positive schooling outcomes, these transfers have lowered the poverty rate, improved the nutritional status of poor households, and have increased the proportion of children receiving vaccinations and other health services. While there is great variance in performance, a dollar spent on such programs on average produces benefits of about $9. Because the programs increase the intensity of child investment in school as well as child time in school, they help to break the cycle of poverty whereby poor parents underinvest in their children’s schooling and doom their children to poverty.

Benefits of extra education

Without peace and stability, there are impediments to solving every other challenge that we look at in the Copenhagen Consensus 2012 series. Armed conflict is a major global problem that disproportionately affects the world’s poorest. Not a single low-income country afflicted by violence has achieved even one of the eight Millennium Development goals.

Stability brings foreign investment which takes nations out of poverty. Giving them a job disparages against criminality, giving them an education leads them towards more complex jobs, foreign investment is a win for both countries: poorer countries get jobs, less corruption than at a local level (Salaries of intnl companiss also tend to exceed local companies by a large margin). Companies are risk averse, they don't invest in desstabilised countries. Look at china now: from extreme poverty to half the population existing in the middle class

Paul Collier, economic reconstruction reduces the risk of a renewed outbreak of conflict by 42 percent in 10 years.

The cost of post-conflict policies is higher than intervention at around $140 billion, and the benefits are also smaller at $404 billion. In total, it is estimated that each dollar will avoid at least $3 of conflict damage.

Preventing conflict is far more economical than responding to conflict and economic reconstruction.

Cambridge University Press book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change.)

Possible read

Climate policy, he notes, is not about spending money. It is about raising money (and, of course, about finding the best way to spend the revenues raised through a carbon tax).

Good point, money cannot be spent if it is not raised

Unfortunately, policymakers violate these rules a lot in the real world. It is increasingly clear that governments have great difficulty in delivering the cheapest possible emission-reduction programs. (See Tol’s earlier paper looking at the very large price tag of European Union climate change policies.) Very stringent emission-reduction targets such as the long-term goals of the European Union simply do not pass the benefit/cost test: They actually cause more damage than they prevent.

Big claim Bjorn makes.

Galiana and Green conclude that increased funding for low-carbon research and development would have benefits ranging from three to 11 times higher than the cost, depending on the rate of success and time horizon.

Efficacy of low carbon emissions

Taking this into account, rich countries will adapt to the negative impacts of global warming and exploit the positive changes, actually creating a total positive effect of global warming worth about one-half a percentage point of GDP. However, poor countries will be hit harder. Adaptation will reduce the climate-change-related losses from 5 percent of GDP to slightly less than 3 percent, but this is still a significant negative impact. The real challenge of global warming, therefore, lies in tackling its impact on developing nations. Here, more needs to be done, above and beyond the adaptation that will happen naturally.

One promising approach is stratospheric aerosol injection—where a precursor of sulfur dioxide would be continuously injected into the stratosphere, forming a thin layer of aerosols to reflect sunlight. The amount of sulfur required to offset global warming is on the order of 2 percent of the sulfur that humans already inject into the atmosphere, largely through burning fossil fuels. Another suggested approach is marine cloud whitening, where seawater would be mixed into the atmosphere at sea to make the clouds slightly whiter and more reflective.

Interesting ways to solve climate change via geo engineering

Moreover, if climate change should suddenly get much worse (reaching the so-called “tipping points”), geoengineering appears to be the only technology that could quickly cool the Earth. This feature would allow it to act as an insurance against extreme and highly uncertain climate outcomes.

Emergency Response

Biodiversity

Often, biodiversity campaigners have attempted to capture our attention with pictures of cuddly endangered animals or alarming figures about the rate of disappearing species. In practice it is difficult to actually quantify the loss of biodiversity, let alone put a value on it. What scientists can do instead is measure “ecosystem services.”

Deifnion of biodiversity

50 years. In a research paper on biodiversity for Copenhagen Consensus 2012, Salman Hussain and Anil Markandya find that there will be a significant loss of biodiversity over the next 40 years. They estimate that this loss could be about 12 percent globally, with South Asia facing a loss of 30 percent and sub-Saharan Africa 18 percent. They look at three interventions and compare these to doing nothing.

Loss of biodiversity

The most cost-effective approach would be to invest $75 billion into building flood walls around some of these communities. Kunreuther and Michel-Kerjan calculate the benefits over the next 50 years as $4.5 trillion, making the benefits a remarkable 60 times higher than the costs. Those benefits would mostly come from reduction in damages, though the walls would also save 20,000 lives.

Efficient means of combating flood damages

Thirdly, they propose strengthening the roofs of houses in countries with high exposure to hurricanes and cyclones to reduce losses from wind damage. This would cost $951 billion in the 34 countries most prone to high wind events, with benefits ranging between two and three times this amount. This measure would save 65,700 lives over the next 50 years.

Reduce damages via hurricane

Finally, Kunreuther and Michel-Kerjan explore setting up early disaster warning systems. Based on existing studies and research from Stephane Hallegatte, they find that early warning systems in developing countries would require less than $1 billion a year and would have direct benefits (reductions in the losses from disasters) of between $1 billion and $5.5 billion per year. There are additional benefits, such as the reduction in evacuation costs, the reduced costs to the health care system, improved continuity of education (from preserving schools), reduced social stress, and avoided business interruption, which is worth at least another $3 billion and possibly $30 billion. In total, the benefits could range from four to 35 times their cost. But who should pay for disaster protection measures? As Kunreuther and Michel-Kerjan point out, there is a need to persuade international donors to start investing more systematically in disaster risk reduction before a disaster strikes, rather than focusing almost exclusively on post-disaster assistance, as they do today.

Early warming systems mitigate damage by allowing preparation measures

In the last two decades, a growing body of research has substantially strengthened the case for family-planning programs—documenting, for example, the significant effects of these programs toward reducing fertility, increasing education for mothers, improving women’s general health and longer-term survival, increasing female labor force participation and earnings, as well as child health. However, the attempt to obtain reasonably reliable estimates of both the benefits and costs of these programs remains very challenging. Kohler draws on recent estimates to find that expanding family-planning services to all women with unmet needs—215 million women—would require an additional annual expenditure of $3.6 billion, bringing the total annual cost to $6.7 billion. Three-quarters of these additional expenses would be required for program and other systems costs related to expanding family planning services, while only 16 percent would be required for the supplies and contraceptive commodities. The benefits are large. Reduced fertility, increased child spacing, and possible reductions in unwanted fertility are likely to reduce infant and maternal mortality, each year leading to 150,000 fewer maternal deaths and 600,000 fewer motherless children.

Why planned parenthood is good in terms of climate prospects

The story of water and sanitation is one of success and failure. The world has met the Millennium Development Goal on the provision of clean drinking water five years early, but is set to miss its goal on basic sanitation by almost one billion people. An astonishing one-third of the world population, 2.5 billion people, lacks access to basic sanitation. More than one billion people must defecate out in the open rather than using the toilets that we take for granted in the developed world. Inadequate sanitation is much more than an inconvenience. It costs lives. It caused a cholera outbreak in Haiti in late 2010 that has now made 500,000 people sick and killed 7,000. Smaller cholera outbreaks are still commonplace during the rainy season in Bangladesh and the low-lying parts of many African cities. Diarrheal diseases are still a leading cause of death for children under 5, second only to respiratory infections. The World Bank concludes that the economic impact of poor sanitation can be as high as 7 percent of GDP for some Asian countries and close to 1 to 2 percent of GDP for African countries.

cholera is such a disgusting disease- shitting and vomiting up shit in water, only to drink from the exact same pool of water. Water filtration is an absolutely necessary pillar for stability.