Bjørn Lomborg

Three years have passed since world leaders adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 169 targets that must be reached to transform the planet. We are one-fifth of our way towards 2030, but miles behind on achieving the lofty goals to reduce poverty, increase prosperity, protect the planet and advance peace.

There are worrying signs that the number of extremely poor people in the world – which has long been dropping – may stop falling and might even start rising. And after years of decline, hunger is increasing – with observers linking this to regional conflicts and climate change. Of most concern: the world’s development agenda, based around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is not fit for purpose.

With input from more than 400 experts from government, international organisations, scholars, and intellectuals, the Bangladesh Priorities project helped identify 76 investments that would help achieve the nation's goals under the 7th Five Year Plan.

The wide-ranging work on prioritising public investment in Bangladesh ahead of the 7th Five Year Plan and the benefit-cost research findings were published in The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, as well as the London-based Economist. These were widely acclaimed by economists in the country, highly appreciated by the government, and contributed directly to policymaking.

Bangladesh Priorities effectively created a policy “menu”, in which—for the first time—costs and benefits for many spending options were clearly identified. The government of Bangladesh was very receptive to the new evidence. The “menu” of interventions was presented and discussed twice with the prime minister of Bangladesh, along with her economic and energy advisors, the finance minister, and the state minister for planning and finance.

Now, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) and Copenhagen Consensus Center have jointly initiated the “Bangladesh Priorities 2.0” to go much further and deeper in analysing four interventions.

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New research for India Consensus makes a strong case to take adolescent physical and mental health seriously, recommending to prevent child marriage and anemia among adolescent girls, as well as school based behavioral screening. Shireen Vakil and I discuss these findings in Deccan Herald.

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Global leaders recently swept into NYC for the UNGA. During the high-level get-together, two very different meetings held at the exactly same time revealed much about their priorities and their flawed approach to the planet’s biggest problems.

While a gala event for the expensive and ineffective Paris Climate Treaty was well attended by world leaders, the 1st ever UN leaders’ meeting on TB made a far smaller splash. Yet, for an annual cost of 1/2 of one hundredth of the cost of Paris, we could avoid the deaths of more than 1M people each year from TB, as I show in The Australian.

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Climate change is both trivialized and hampered by unrealistic senses of magnitude, and by silly suggestions that an individual's actions can transform the planet.

Abandoning meat is now the latest advice for saving the planet, with some claiming that a huge reduction in meat-eating is "essential to avoid climate breakdown.”
In an article for New York Post, I look at the evidence and find that eating carrots instead of steak means you effectively cut your emissions by about 2 percent. This won’t save the planet.

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