Who decides the priorities when saving the world?

What most people shrugged off as rubbish 20 years ago is now perceived to be the gospel truth. And now there are such vitriolic evangelists in favour that one has to be superbly courageous to even voice an opinion against it. This truth is the issue of global warming. There, I can already see the hackles rising. What now, you ask yourself.

Bearing this in mind, then, one has to give the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg an especially large medal for bravery for speaking out on the subject. This does not mean that Lomborg is opposed to the idea that there is such a thing as global warming, or questioning that it is busy destroying our planet Earth. Not at all. What he is saying, rather, is that the world has huge problems, in addition to global warming, and that available aid funding would not be sufficient to address all these problems.

On the list of the most pressing problems the world faces are poverty, starvation, malnutrition, lack of water and sanitation, HIV/Aids, malaria, lack of free trade and migration of people, just to mention some of them. He was not the only one who compiled this list. In 2004, Lomborg convened a Copenhagen Consensus at which the participants tried to establish a strategy on how to tackle these challenges with a view to using the limited available funds as effectively as possible.

During these discussions a plan of action was recommended. Previously no organisation, including the United Nations, had established any kind of plan to view and tackle the overall problems facing the world. This Copenhagen Consensus tried to do this involving many experts in various areas such as health plus adding in a sprinkling of economists to assist with predictions on costs and possible outcomes.

The recommendations of these experts was that the number-one priority for the world should be to spend available funding on the HIV/Aids pandemic, both for prevention and for healthcare for infected people. The conclusion they drew was that the available funding would provide the most “bang for the buck” if spending was focused on this issue. In other words, it would be the most effective way of spending the world’s aid funding.

The second world problem the experts decided should receive funding was malnutrition. Number three in terms of importance, they felt, was the principle of offering fair trade to countries outside North America and Europe, as this would enable areas such as the sub-Sahara to earn a more sustainable living through trade. The fourth issue to be addressed was malaria.

Global warming only featured as number 17 on the list. Its position on the chart was determined by how expensive it would be to address serious global-warming issues, in relation to how much more effective the money could be spent addressing malaria or combating the spread of HIV/Aids, for instance.

During this meeting of bright minds, it was also decided that many of the world interventions such as fighting the spread of HIV/Aids would automatically enable the human race to be more aware of environmental issues in that it would not need to focus all of its attention on its survival. Some of its effort could be spent on ensuring that some global-warming issues became important.

The most important question one needs to ask, then, is whether one should allow a group of economists to determine what is important for the world. Who, after all, should determine what the money needs to be spent on when every single major problem — whether malnutrition, HIV/Aids or global warming — needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency?

Remember the popular debating topic — when a plane is falling from the sky, who out of all the passengers gets to use the one and only parachute? Or on the cruiser that is sinking, who gets to climb into the lifeboat? Check the video of Bjorn Lomborg discussing the topic of global problems and make up your own mind on which one you feel is the most important.