Money that world leaders plan to spend on a warning system against the kind of tsunami that killed 150,000 on December 26 would be better spent fighting everyday diseases, according to Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg. Mr Lomborg, the 40-year-old enfant terrible of the environmental movement, says the desire to build a system is understandable - and reasonably cheap at an estimated $US20 million initially - but that its benefits were uncertain given the lack of necessary supporting infrastructure in many places. He adds that 100 years or more could pass before the next tsunami strikes. "On the other hand, we would certainly save many lives by investing that money in clean drinking water, disease prevention and basic education," Mr Lomborg said.
In South-East Asia alone, 3 million people die every year from infectious and parasitic diseases - most curable with inexpensive drugs, Mr Lomborg said. "The tsunami toll represents only three weeks of disease-borne death in South-East Asia," he said. At a one-day summit in Jakarta yesterday, world leaders backed the creation of an Indian Ocean early warning system similar to one functioning in the Pacific. Mr Lomborg first attracted attention in 1998 with his book The Sceptical Environmentalist in which he said forests were hardly shrinking, fewer species were becoming extinct than believed and oceans were becoming cleaner. He argued that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on curbing greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto pact would only delay global temperature rises by six years over this century, and would be better spent fighting AIDS, hunger or illiteracy. |