Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Youth Forum

The Copenhagen Consensus Youth Forum was held at the same time as the Copenhagen Consensus 2008. The purpose of the Youth Forum was to put the question of prioritization on the agenda and make the ideas and concepts behind Copenhagen Consensus more accessible.

The participants in the Youth Forum were put to the same task as the economic experts in the Copenhagen Consensus panel: answering the question of how we should prioritize solutions to ten of the world's most pressing challenges.

The vision of Copenhagen Consensus Youth Forum was to contribute to an open, public debate on how to prioritize solutions to ten of the world's most pressing challenges.

Which challenges should we fight first: that 800 million people starve, that more than one billion people don't have access to safe drinking water, that one million people will be affected by global warming? Copenhagen Consensus dealt with this difficult prioritization by looking at concrete opportunities.

The process of ranking the solutions culminated in a four-day meeting, during which the Challenge Paper authors and the Perspective Paper authors presented the results of their work to the Youth Forum. The Youth Forum will met in open sessions. Each member of the Youth Forum made an individual ranking of the solutions, giving a prioritized answer to the question:

If the world would come together and be willing to spend, say, $75 billion additionally over the next four years on improving the state of the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits?

By asking decision-makers of tomorrow to express their priorities to supplement those of the economists' expert panel, the youth forum served to broaden and anchor the Copenhagen Consensus idea globally, and across generations.