Choose your own priorities on our interactive table

Issues: conflict l global warming l disease l hunger l terrorism

AIR POLLUTION

Improved Stoves: Providing a chimneyless rocket stove to half the people using unhealthy, old-fashioned stoves, to cut the negative health effects of indoor air pollution

An introduction to the Copenhagen Consensus

Economists battle it out to rank possible solutions for the great challenges in global stability and security

Multimedia

• Make your own rankings on our interactive table

BACKGROUND

• Copenhagen Consensus: conflict

• Copenhagen Consensus: disease

• Copenhagen Consensus: global warming

• Copenhagen Consensus: hunger

• Copenhagen Consensus: terrorism

Improving Road Vehicle Fuel: Switching to low and ultra-low sulphur vehicle fuels (diesel and gasoline) for urban vehicles in nations affected by air pollution

Diesel Particulate Control: Retrofitting diesel buses and delivery trucks with filters that reduce urban pollution and its health effects

Inspection & Maintenance for Diesel Vehicles: Introducing exhaust emission limits and checking tailpipe emissions in a bid to curb pollution

CONFLICT

Aid: Dedicating aid to nations emerging from conflict to boost growth and ensure they do not relapse into violence

Peacekeeping: Sending significant military forces into nations emerging from conflict to reduce the risk of a relapse into violence

Conditional Aid: Linking aid to limits on military spending, to improve its cost-benefit ratio

Over-the-Horizon Guarantees: Providing (and delivering if necessary) a promise to intervene when a democratically-elected government is threatened by violence

Combined Peacekeeping and Over-the-Horizon Guarantees: Five-year peacekeeping operations, followed by over-the-horizon guarantees

DISEASE

Malaria: Combining malaria prevention (mosquito nets, DDT spray, etc) with subsidies for artimisinin combination therapies

Heart Disease: Cheap drugs for acute heart disease for developing countries.

Tuberculosis: Combining drugs with improved case identification in affected nations

Childhood Diseases: Expanding immunisation and micronutrient supplements for children in developing nations

Tobacco: Implementing tobacco taxes in developing nations, matched by publicity campaigns to highlight the health effects of smoking

HIV/Aids: A combination approach, including condom distribution, treatment of sexually transmitted disease, male circumcision and peer interventions among sex workers

Hospitals: Investing to improve surgical capacity in district hospitals

EDUCATION

Health and Nutrition Programmes: Providing nutritional supplements or treatments for intestinal parasites to raise school attendance and increase physical and mental capacity, in targeted areas of need

Scholarship/Voucher Programmes: Ensuring poor parents have the resources to send children to school

Conditional Cash Transfers: Paying parents in exchange for sending their children to school regularly

GLOBAL WARMING

Mitigation Only: Using economic instruments such as a carbon tax to reduce annual emissions, with no R&D investment or proactive adaptation

Mitigation plus Research & Development: Investing immediately in R&D to make low-carbon energy options available more quickly, and to increase the effectiveness of mitigation in the longer term

Mitigation plus Adaptation and Research & Development: Combining R&D and mitigation with measures designed to ameliorate various health impacts: simultaneously ‘fighting the disease’ and ‘treating the symptoms’

Research & Development Only: Focusing investment on research and development to stimulate the shift to low-cost, low-carbon energy technologies

HUNGER AND MALNUTRITION

Micronutrient Supplements: Providing Vitamin A and Zinc supplements to 80 per cent of children under-two across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia

Micronutrient fortification: Adding iron to basic food items like flour, to prevent anaemia, and iodising salt, to eliminate goitre

Biofortification: Breeding plants with a higher micronutrient content

Deworming: Providing two de-worming treatments annually for 80 per cent of children between ages 1 and 3, in Africa and South East Asia

Nutrition Education: Promoting lasting dietary improvements, reaching 80 per cent of the worst-affected families with young children

SANITATION AND WATER

Rural Water Supply: Providing poor communities in Africa with deep boreholes and public hand pumps

Total Sanitation Campaign: Raising awareness of health and social benefits of sanitation, with aim of achieving “open defecation-free communities” in South Asia

Biosand Filters: Ensuring affected communities have access to technology to remove contaminants in raw water supplies

Dams: Building reservoirs in some parts of Africa, such as the scarcely inhabited Blue Nile gorge in Ethiopia, to generate power, mitigate droughts, and improve irrigation

TERRORISM

Business as Usual: Continuing with current levels of counter-terrorism spending and the world’s present focus on counter-terrorism options

Greater International Co-operation: Improving the ability to financially monitor, trace and clamp down on terrorists' funds

Increased Proactive Response: Taking more ‘proactive’ actions against terrorists such as Operation Enduring Freedom, which included the invasion of Afghanistan

Augmented Defence: Nations likely to be victims of trans-national terrorism focus on making key targets harder to attack

Sensitive Foreign Policy: The United States makes a significant change in foreign policy, designed to present a positive image and negate terrorist propaganda, including a significant increase in aid that is made without strings attached

TRADE AND SUBSIDIES

Trade Reform: Reaching a high-quality outcome to the Doha international trade round, in which developing countries cut their tariffs by the same proportion as high-income countries, and services and investment are also liberalised

Migration Reform: Increasing the rate of migration to boost the labor force in high-income countries by a total of 3 per cent over a 25 year period

Trade and Migration reform: Combining the two solutions above

WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT

Girls’ Schooling: Paying mothers to send their daughters to school.

Women’s Microfinance: Making new small loans to poor women borrowers to increase their consumption and improve their financial bargaining power in their household

Support for Reproduction: Implementing and improving family planning programs, birthing services and emergency care

Affirmative Action in Politics: Setting aside political positions for women, with an advocacy campaign to support this, and training for women politicians

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