Humanitarian Issues to Spend on Other than Global Warming - Essay Example

If only we were living in an ideal world, we could solve all our problems. But given that we don’t, we cannot solve all of them due to the fact that resources are scarce, limited and competitive among the various priority choices of which problem to solve first (Bradshaw, Dymond and George). There are several challenges in the world that make us vulnerable to these problems. Some of these are; climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, corruption and governance, malnutrition and hunger, population and migration, sanitation and water, subsidies and trade barriers among others. Solutions are also so many and we cannot be able to spend on all of them, that is why we again need to list some of the top priorities which we can work with. This is what I can do better as a UN economist since economists make priorities.

Solutions to mitigate big problems like global warming, migration, communicable diseases are rated very expensive yet what we need to do is very little therefore such solutions will come at the bottom of my list. We can instead spend half of this money to solve some basic problems in the world which include giving clean drinking water, good sanitation, basic health care and education to every being on the globe which cost so little.

Coming to the top of the list, the problem I can prioritize fourth is the issue of malaria control where mosquito nets and effective medication can reduce the incidence of malaria by half and about $13 billion can be used to do this which will bring four times the benefits more than this cost. This will enable save billions of lives that will be able to deal with other problems and in the long run, deal even with global warming. The third best is free trade by cutting subsidies in the US and Europe where the aggregate benefit of this would be $2,400 billion a year to the global economy. The second best thing is to focus on malnutrition. This is by dealing with the lack of micronutrients like iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A, by investing about $12 billion. And the very best problem is to focus on HIV/AIDS. If we invest $27 000 billion in the next 8 years, according to Ted (Bjorn), we can save 28 million cases of HIV-caused deaths. The preventive measures to this problem are cheaper than treatment measures hence we can invest more in prevention which brings ten times extra benefits.

In a nutshell, we should do all things in an ideal world, but since we cannot do all things, we need to first deal with the things that we can spend less amount but in return give us enormous benefits.