Dr. Lomborg stopped by The New York Times to speak with Nicholas Kristof about the work of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and how to do the most good in the world. “You can spend your money and do a lot of good many different places but some places you will do just a little good and some places you will do a lot good. Let’s do those places first.” – Bjorn Lomborg

Politicians and philanthropists often talk about abstract, lofty ideas such as sustainability and transformation through dialogue. So Bill Gates and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi should be applauded for tackling a more mundane, but crucial, subject: toilets. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to transform toilet technology itself, so that toilets aren’t dependent on major infrastructure, such as sewage systems and water-treatment plants. In 2011, the Gates Foundation launched its Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, which provides grants for researchers “who are using...

Here’s $2.5 trillion. You have 15 years to spend it. How do you distribute this money in a way that will achieve the most good for the world? This isn’t a hypothetical. In September 2015, the United Nations set its Sustainable Development Goals, a continuation of the Millennium Development Goals it set in 2000. Bjorn Lomborg has a few ideas about how the money should be spent. A self-proclaimed “public intellectual” and adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Lomborg also runs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which tries to calculate the best return on...

The food at your supermarket is changing. The biggest food giants are investing more in organic produce. French multinational Danone just spent $10 billion buying WhiteWave Foods, an American producer of dairy alternatives and organic foods. Stressing the importance of organics, the Danone CEO says: “The reality has changed on the shelf.” Organic food has become the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. food industry, with sales that increase by double digits annually. That’s a lot of kale flying off the shelves. Buying it makes us feel like we’re helping ourselves and...

Bangladesh has made great strides in many areas, including poverty eradication and life expectancy. There are still many opportunities for investments that improve the nation's future and transform lives. Recently, a high-level team of prominent Bangladeshi development and economics leaders and a Nobel Laureate in Economics identified a prioritised list of such opportunities. They were tasked with answering the question: “What policies and investments would give Bangladesh the most impact for every taka spent?” My think-tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, commissioned teams...

Are droughts, hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters getting stronger and more frequent? Are carbon dioxide emissions, global temperatures and sea levels putting us on a path for climate catastrophe? Bjorn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, breaks down the facts about the environment and shows why the reality of climate change may be very different from what you hear in the media.

Improving energy efficiency is a fashionable policy that governments worldwide promote. On paper, it seems a no-brainer: improving energy efficiency is sold as cost-reducing, job-creating, and planet-saving. Win, win, win – and the media often help close the deal, focusing entirely on all the supposed upsides. But there is another side – a downside – to the story. After spending £240 million ($316 million), the United Kingdom ended government funding for its flagship energy-efficiency-loan program last year, after a scathing report from the National Audit Office showed...

Ten months ago, world leaders gathered at the United Nations to adopt 169 targets that will shape much of the $2.5tn expected to be spent on development assistance over the next 15 years, along with many trillions of dollars of national budgets. This week government ministers return to discuss the implementation of the sustainable development goals, amid growing recognition of the challenges of pursuing so many well-meaning ambitions at once. During the drawn-out process in which donor and recipient nations, NGOs and advocacy groups struggled over which development goals would be given the UN...

Is Greenpeace committing a crime against humanity? A letter from 110 Nobel laureates suggests as much. It urges the environmental group to drop its campaign against genetically modified foods, particularly so-called “Golden Rice,” which could help prevent millions of deaths in the developing world. Calling GMOs food “Frankenfood” is a brilliant scare-mongering term, heavily promoted by Greenpeace. But it has no basis in reality. Just a couple of months ago, the National Academies of Sciences found in its latest report that GMOs “are as safe as” non-GMOs...

OVER THE NEXT 15 years, a rough calculation suggests that at least $2.5 trillion will be spent on development assistance. Where this spending goes will largely be dictated by 169 development targets that the United Nations has endorsed for the next decade and a half. Next week, government ministers will return to New York to discuss the implementation of the Sustainable Development Agenda, amid growing recognition of the headache of trying to pursue so many different well-meaning ambitions at once. This situation was inevitable. The Sustainable Development Agenda was the result of a painfully...