The $50 Billion Dollar Challenges for Issues Facing Humanity

The $50 Billion Dollar Challenges for Issues Facing Humanity

A report by Great Dane Consulting

Executive Summary

Great Dane Consulting was commissioned by Roger Pielke Jr. to allocate $50 billion to address the twelve largest issues facing humanity. The twelve challenges include climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts and arms proliferation, access to education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and access to clean water, subsidies and trade barriers, energy and land degradation.

Our firm approached this task by developing an explicit goal statement: to allocate a total of $50 billion to projects that provide immediate and lasting maximum net positive human benefits to developing countries. We define human benefit as an improvement in the quality of human life through protection and enhancement of basic human needs. Basic human needs include, but are not limited to, access to adequate food, water, and shelter, and health, as well as protection from violence and discrimination.

Using our goal statement as a guiding principle, we evaluated the applicability of 61
opportunities to solve the 12 global crises. We used 11 criteria1 to guide our decision making process and eliminated all but 16 of the opportunities. Presented in the table below are the opportunities selected, the ranking they received, and the dollar amounts allocated. It is important to note that the dollar amount allocated to each project does not reflect the value of the project, rather it is the estimated cost of funding the project for one year.

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