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Writer's pictureJohn B. Parisutham

Global priorities

In the 6th week lecture we have advised to watch a video and to answer some questions. Despite of technical impairments in the lecture theater, our lecturers’ crew managed to play the video after a 20 minutes of tiring effort. The video was a TED presentation by a Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, who is the head of Copenhagen Consensus. His thoughts were marvelous and based on current situation and demand of today’s world.

When he was commencing the presentation he request the audience to have a pen and a paper just to jot down answers. The topic which he emphasizes is “Global priorities bigger than climate change”. His presentation is inspiring and made us think how the way we should think. In 2011, there was an event called “Earth hour” held in AiU claiming to be a worldly event which was initiated in saving the planet by saving the power. Though I participated in that event I hardly believed that this could benefit the earth in anyway. Then it made me think and search upon this topic. In this research I found out certain experts questioning the world whether there is really a global warming or is that a fallacy which deviated people’s thinking from the truth.

Nevertheless Bjorn Lomborg talks about the problems which the world experiencing right now such as lack of drinking water, poverty, internal conflicts, civil wars, illiterate adults and so on. He stated that there are 800 million people are starving, 1 billion suffering from lack of clean drinking water, 2 billion people are lack of sanitation, 2 million are dying from AIDS each year, 175 million international migrants, 940 million illiterate adults and eventually global warming. Professor posed a question on us saying if we were to be given a sum, for instance a 50 billion euros, what problems will you admit according to its prioritization?

We were given a time to answer this question. I answered according to the complexity or context of the problem. Which I felt if the problem is less complex then

it is easier to be solved. Therefore I said the last problem to be attended or addressed is the corruption in the government. Though it seems to be an easy issue to be solved that is the toughest problem which will take longer time to solve.

At the end of the lecture professor asked us to produce our answers. So some students explained the reasons behind their prioritization. Professor commented on some students and said “The issue of globalization is the least issue to be addressed because it absorbs large sum of money and takes decades to a slight change. We are unable to change the climate back to normal      but rather we could only make the situation which comes in 10 years to come after 12 years. Therefore I would like to quote Bjorn’s statement here ““Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don’t have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems; the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.” And “We’ve had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we’ve never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, ‘Which of them should we do first?’” These are the statements which world should sit and think.

Week 6- Reflective Diary

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