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Why family planning is a smart investment
The United Kingdom recently announced that it will spend £600 million ($779 million) to provide 20 million more women and girls in the developing world with access to family planning. Their decision – based on research by the Copenhagen Consensus Center that shows family planning is one of the smartest possible development investments – is a vitally important one.
Achieving universal access to contraception would save and improve millions of lives, and put societies on a faster track to shared prosperity. Each year we would see 640,000 fewer newborn deaths, 150,000 fewer maternal deaths, and 600,000 fewer children losing their mothers. With so much at stake, the world should be devoting far more attention and resources to this goal.
Lomborg's new column for Project Syndicate (available in five languages) was published by newspapers around the globe, including The Australian, Shanghai Daily (China), Irish Examiner, Berlingske (Denmark), My Republica (Nepal), Jordan Times, Telegrafi (Albania) and Acento (Dominican Republic).
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Climate activists are focused on the wrong solutions
As it is becoming obvious that political responses to global warming such as the Paris treaty are not working, environmentalists are urging us to consider the climate impact of our personal actions. Don’t eat meat, don’t drive a gasoline-powered car and don’t fly, they say. But these individual actions won’t make a substantial difference to our planet, and such demands divert attention away from the solutions that are needed.
Lomborg argues in New York Post that the solution to climate change cannot be found in personal changes in the homes of the middle classes of rich countries. Instead, we need to focus on technological solutions that will bring forward the day when green-energy alternatives are cheaper and more attractive than fossil fuels not just for the elite but for the entire world.
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We are helping set priorities for Ghana. Recently, 25 teams of economists presented the initial findings in Accra to almost three hundred sector experts from across the country — in fields such as health, education, gender, environment, poverty, agriculture, and infrastructure. The project essentially seeks to find out where each cedi (or dollar) spent can yield the greatest economic, social and environmental benefits.
The project has full support from the agency advising the president. The Director General of the National Development Planning Commission, Dr Mensah-Abrampa, is excited to make this "an ongoing and continual process." He added: "So if we get new resources coming into the national budget, we will know where exactly to put these resources so we can make the most gains."
Over the coming months, researchers from Ghana and abroad will assess the costs and benefits of more than 80 policy proposals, which will be presented to an Eminent Panel that includes some of Ghana’s most accomplished economists, the Finance Minister, the Minister of Planning and a Nobel Laureate in May 2020.
The project is receiving great interest from local media, with many of Ghana’s leading newspapers such as Daily Graphic, Daily Guide, Ghana Business News and News Ghana as well as multiple TV channels reporting.
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Help people get rich to defuse the 'population bomb'
During a recent visit to New York City, Bjorn Lomborg was interviewed by Stuart Varney on the Fox Business Channel. He argued that exaggerations about the consequences of global warming are leading to poor policy proposals such as the Green New Deal, and explained that the answer to global population growth is contraception and lifting people in the developing world out of poverty.
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Many western donors love the idea that instead of dirty, coal-fired power-plants, poor nations should ‘leapfrog’ straight to cleaner energy sources such as off-grid solar technology. But many cases around the developing world show that solar panels are mostly useless for tackling the main power challenges of the world’s poor.
Three billion people continue to suffer from the dangerous effects of indoor air pollution, burning dirty fuels like wood and dung to cook and keep warm. Solar panels don’t solve that problem because they are too weak to power clean stoves and heaters. Nor can off-grid solar panels power machinery for agriculture or factories that create jobs and pathways out of poverty.
Lomborg writes for Forbes and the two Australian newspapers Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun (print) that telling the world’s poor to live with unreliable, expensive, weak power is an insult.
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