Bjørn Lomborg

Why organisations work with Bjørn Lomborg

• He brings a formal economic framework, developed with Nobel laureate economists through the Copenhagen Consensus project, for ranking interventions by return on spend rather than political salience.
• His argument is specific and well-published: The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001), False Alarm (Basic Books, 2020), and Best Things First (2023, named a Best Book of the year by The Economist) give boards a documented thesis to engage with.
• He is one of the few commentators on climate economics taken seriously in policy and finance rooms while remaining openly sceptical of orthodox climate spending priorities, which is valuable for leadership teams wanting a genuine debate rather than a consensus reaffirmation.
• He speaks the language of trade-offs, not advocacy, which suits boards and investment committees that have to defend capital allocation to shareholders and regulators.
• His institutional base (Copenhagen Consensus Center, Hoover Institution at Stanford, Copenhagen Business School) gives a clear provenance that buyers can cite internally.

Biography highlights

• President and founder, Copenhagen Consensus Center.
• Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
• Visiting Professor, Copenhagen Business School.
• Ph.D. in Political Science, University of Copenhagen.
• Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, False Alarm, and Best Things First.
• Named to TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People (2004); Top 100 Global Thinker, Foreign Policy (2011, 2012).

Biography

Most climate and development debate is framed as moral argument. Lomborg’s career has been spent reframing it as an allocation problem. Through the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which he founded and leads, he works with more than 300 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, to rank global interventions by cost and benefit rather than by political attention.

That method produced the thesis running through his published work. The Skeptical Environmentalist, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001, argued that many accepted environmental narratives did not match the data. Cool It and False Alarm, the latter from Basic Books in 2020, applied the same analytic discipline to climate policy. Best Things First, published in 2023, ranks twelve interventions by expected human and economic return and was named a Best Book of 2023 by The Economist.

His institutional base reflects the seriousness of the work. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen, is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School. TIME Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in 2004. Foreign Policy placed him on its Top 100 Global Thinkers list in 2011 and again in 2012.

Lomborg is a contested figure in climate debate, and boards hire him knowing that. The value is a disciplined, published, defensible argument that forces leadership teams to compare what they are spending on sustainability with what that spend actually delivers.

Key speaking topics

• Cost-benefit analysis in climate and development policy
• Climate economics and capital allocation
• Global development priorities and the Sustainable Development Goals
• Evidence-based policymaking
• ESG and sustainability trade-offs
• Long-horizon risk and resource allocation

Ideal for

• Board and executive audiences reviewing climate and ESG capital allocation
• Chief sustainability officers and chief risk officers working through net-zero trade-offs
• Investment committees and asset owners stress-testing climate assumptions
• Policy, philanthropy, and development leaders ranking interventions under fixed budgets

Audience outcomes

• A clear framework for comparing climate and development interventions by measurable return, not political profile.
• A working vocabulary for challenging internal ESG and sustainability spending claims.
• Exposure to the Copenhagen Consensus ranking method and how it has been applied to real policy choices.
• A more defensible position when boards are asked how their climate capital is justified.