Does Fashionable Beat Rational When It Comes to Solving the World's Biggest Problems?

The third dispatch from the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus Conference

Ronald Bailey | May 28, 2008

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The last major challenge considered was the provision of clean water and sanitation presented by University of North Carolina public health professor Dale Whittington. He noted that about 1.1 billion people lacked improved water supplies, and more than 2.7 billion had no sanitation service. Whittington immediately disabused the audience of the notion that networks of piped water and sanitation were cost effective for many poor people in the world. He pointed out that "the incremental benefit of improved water supply may simply not cover the large cost of providing it, since by definition everyone has some access to water in order to live, and the willingness to pay for an improvement may be low." The full economic costs of such systems range between $40 and $80 per month which is vastly more than many people's monthly incomes. Networked sewage systems cost even more.

Whittington did offer some cost-effective solutions, including deep borehole wells combined with hand pumps. Such wells could supply water to 60 households. Until recently, even this was not considered economically feasible, but Whittington claimed that the costs of boreholes in Africa have now been halved to about $6,000 because of recently increased competition, especially from Chinese contractors active in the region. Adding up the capital costs implies a monthly cost of $2.26 per household.

With regard to sanitation, Whittington recommended financing Community-Led Total Sanitation (CTLS) campaigns. CLTS programs aim to ban open defecation by explaining disease transmission routes and mobilizing social pressure to encourage community members to use low-cost latrines. Whittington estimated that the overall monthly cost of CLTS per household is 32 cents.

The final three big global challenges—women and development, subsidies and trade barriers, and education—will be presented on Wednesday. The Youth Forum will announce its ranking of solutions on Thursday and the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus panel of experts will announce its rankings on Friday.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: Danish taxpayers are paying my travel expenses to attend CC08. There are no conditions placed upon my reporting.

Comments

Guy Montag|5.28.08 @ 3:50PM|#

Love that line about what is more fashionable than global warming :)

So, when is Erich von Däniken scheduled to speak?

NP|5.28.08 @ 3:58PM|#

Hey Ron, you might wanna revamp your opening paragraph. I suppose editing errors are fashionable in this Internet age, but they're hardly rational.

MikeB|5.28.08 @ 4:07PM|#

I am surprised that their models didn't show that 800 billion spent on global warming would result in 800 billion of losses

|5.28.08 @ 4:09PM|#

Wow Bailey, how can you look at the sun spot climate correlation data and not call bloody murder on the models?

Guy Montag|5.28.08 @ 4:10PM|#

They missed the most important issue to the world right now: Polar Bears. If they spent that money on the Polar Bears, everything would be fine.

Naga Sadow|5.28.08 @ 5:22PM|#

Golly Gee!!! Rocket stoves!!! I see Johnny Knoxville's antics have gone mainstream. Also, Guy, you're losing your credibility with me. I'm with Stephen Colbert on the bear issue.

Douglas Gray|5.29.08 @ 1:14AM|#

Saving children, one by one, with drinking water, sanitation, good nutrition and disease prevention, in areas where there is enough security and social stability to get to them, that is rational.

The temptation at such conferences is to indulge in environmental and social engineering fantasies. Identify these for what they are, and avoid them.

|5.29.08 @ 8:40PM|#

Douglas Gray: what you said, but maybe more nightmares than "fanatisies." $800M is just a pump-primer for the ecoelite. Spend that fixing the problem; then demand double that to fix the unintended consequences of the fix, ad absurdum, ad bankruptium.

James Aach|5.30.08 @ 2:20PM|#

I'd say there are two types of "fashionable" to be considered - one among scientists, economists and other experts, and the other among the media - - what gets reported and what doesn't. The latter drives much of public opinion and therefore much of public policy in democracies. From my experience, the media isn't particularly saavy with the hard numbers behind any scientific endeavor, and there's also the deadline pressure to get a story out, rather than the full story out.

Wind power is an excellent example. It's a good thing with a lot of upsides. That is what gets reported. But this is not the full story, by any means. If a 1 Megawatt turbine is being installed, the typical general press report will assume 1 MW output, where in fact the average will be closer to 0.2 - 0.3 MW. Then it is typically said the output will provide enough power for 600 - 1000 homes. Even 1 MW won't really do this in a complete society - in the US, residential only makes up a third of the load, and once that and some other considerations are factored in, only from 100 - 300 households are served by 1 MW on the grid, depending on weather. See the comments at http://raddecision.blogspot.com/2005/08/episode-02.html for a further discussion.