In contrast to the MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals include a large number of environmental targets. Bjorn Lomborg explains in The Guardian which are among the best: Cutting indoor air pollution, halving coral reef loss, taxing pollution damage from energy and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

In 1950, people in South Korea and Pakistan earned roughly the same amount of money annually. Today, the two countries are scarcely comparable. South Korean’s per capita income has grown 23-fold since then, while Pakistan has experienced only a three-fold increase. How we can help more of the world’s poorest countries emulate South Korea’s success is one of the most important questions facing the world today. Better economic outcomes mean empowering entire populations with better health, more education, longer life, and less vulnerability to challenges like natural disasters.

Pope Francis’s much-vaunted Encyclical is rightly concerned with helping the world’s poorest. Climate change will have a bigger impact on poorer people. But the real question is which policies and investments would make the biggest difference for the most vulnerable.

David Cameron will meet fellow world leaders at the G7 conference in Germany. There he has an opportunity to quadruple the reach of British and global aid without spending an extra penny. To do so, he must convince the G7 – representing the biggest global donors – to get serious about focusing on the smartest ways to spend aid money. In short, he needs to persuade them that the United Nations’ unwieldy list of 169 proposed “Sustainable Development Goals” needs to be slashed to just 19 effective development investments, covering three broad areas: people, planet and prosperity.

Opponents of free debate are celebrating. Last week, under pressure from some climate-change activists, the University of Western Australia canceled its contract to host a planned research center, Australia Consensus, intended to apply economic cost-benefit analysis to development projects—giving policy makers a tool to ensure their aid budgets are spent wisely. The new center in Perth was to be a collaboration with a think tank I run, Copenhagen Consensus, which for a decade has conducted similar research. Working with more than 100 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, we have...

The world’s greatest environmental threat disproportionately harms women and children, particularly in the developing world: it is indoor air pollution. The World Health Organization estimates that indoor pollution kills 4.3 million people a year, mainly because 2.8 billion people still use firewood, dung and coal for cooking and keeping warm, breathing polluted air inside their homes every day. Indoor air pollution from cooking and heating with open fires can cause harm equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

West Africa’s Ebola epidemic has dominated headlines for much of the last year. But, as devastating as that outbreak has been, its death toll of less than 20,000 people is dwarfed by that of preventable diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which together caused more than three million deaths in 2013, hitting the world’s poorest people the hardest. This need not be the case; indeed, addressing these diseases would be an extraordinarily good investment.

Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies is an obvious target for the world’s next development goals. The world spends $548 billion subsidizing fossil fuels, mostly in developing countries. A disproportionate share of the subsidies goes to the middle class and the rich – after all, they are the ones who can afford a car in poor countries. Now is the time to cut fossil fuel subsidies. Thanks to plummeting oil prices, it is easier to reduce the subsidies needed to guarantee regulated consumer prices, taking off public pressure against such reforms. Cutting fossil fuel subsidies will help the...

Biodiversity - the species we share our planet with - is under pressure. Post-2015 Consensus research finds that a global target to prevent the loss of coral reefs will gives at least $24 of environmental benefits per dollar spent. Likewise, reducing the current loss of forests by half would likely do about $10 of good for each dollar spent. However, increasing protected areas, because it is very costly but only somewhat helpful, is likely to do less than $1 of good per dollar spent.

It is time to stop our green worship of the electric car. It costs us a fortune, cuts little CO2 and surprisingly kills almost twice the number of people compared with regular gasoline cars.