Not only pandemics

You might think that we'd be well advised, as a species, to prepare for global disasters. And it's true that many people are working, sometimes heroically, at ways of doing so. There are quite a few organisations, for instance, that seek to reduce conflict or eliminate diseases, such as malaria. The difficulty I have is that their work is unsystematic, uncoordinated, and is rewarded in ways that bear no relationship to their success or efficiency. As well, and perhaps more dangerously, there are policies in play that can only accelerate disaster, such as: subsidies to fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the accumulation of weapons of all kinds; and the failure seriously to pursue one of the main goals of the Cairo Population Summit, where 179 signatory countries agreed to provide access to family planning services to all the women who want them. And last, there are ways in which the survival of millions is threatened by entirely new phenomena, such as COVID-19, whose full implications cannot be foreseen.


We need therefore to re-orient the incentives, and to do so in a coherent manner that rewards the survival of our species against calamities of all kinds. This is where the Social Policy Bond principle can help. The issuers of Disaster Prevention Bonds need have no knowledge of the relative likelihoods of known or unforeseeable catastrophic events. Neither would they have to prejudge, with our current limited scientific knowledge, the most efficient ways of ensuring our survival. Instead, the bond mechanism could target the sustained avoidance of any - unspecified - catastrophe. It would do so in a way that encourages the exploration and investigation of all threats, known and new, impartially. Policymakers would not (and anyway could not) have to decide on how dangerous each threat is. That would be left to bondholders, who would have powerful incentives to do so continuously. Investors in the bonds would be rewarded only if they can adapt to rapidly changing events and to our ever-expanding scientific knowledge.

This is a stark contrast to the current approach; the one that has led to highly intelligent people giving our survival a baleful prognosis. The people who are currently working in favour of humanity do so in ways that, while worthy of great respect, are within a system that is heavily weighted to favour the short-term goals of large organisations, including governments, that have little incentive or capacity to care about our future in the long term. Disaster Prevention Bonds, issued with sufficient backing, could change all that.

Tyres kill

For decades now I've been saying that, when looking at complex social and environmental problems, we should reward solutions rather than try to guess the source of the problem then tax or regulate that. Current news gives another example as to why we might do better to act on my suggestion. By focusing exclusively on exhaust emissions, we are ignoring what is quite likely to be a much more dangerous source of vehicular pollution:

Emissions Analytics theorised that, based on 1.5kgs of mass being lost per tyre over a 30,000-mile life, a car emits 200 milligrams of tyre particulate matter every kilometre. At that level, tyre emissions would be 22 times higher than the permitted levels in current exhaust gas regulations, which are 4.5mg/km.

In testing, it stacked the odds up in case practice yielded immeasurably low results. Low quality tyres, high speeds, intense cornering, high load in the car and a poor surface quality, were intended to help produce a measurable result. The results were shocking – 5.8 grams per kilometre lost. That’s 29 times the hypothesised result, and more than 1,000-times the allowed particulate emissions from an exhaust pipe. Tyre emissions 1,000 times WORSE than exhausts, Ethan Jupp, 1 February (or 2 January)

Governments have form with this: their singular obsession with greenhouse gas emissions led them to encourage diesel engines, which emit higher levels than petrol of pollutants other than CO2 that probably cause more illness and death.

So what am I suggesting? That governments, instead of trying to identify causes of complex problems (a moving target anyway), target favourable outcomes and reward the people who reach them. When it comes to air pollution, then, rather than try (and fail) to identify the worst culprits, and regulate those, government should have targeted an air pollution goal, and motivated people to achieve it. Government would then have stepped out of the tricky, divisive and futile role of trying to stipulate how that goal could be best achieved, and who is best placed to achieve it. Government is too monolithic, too unwieldy and too fixed in its ways to come up with the diverse, adaptive approaches that we need to solve complex social and environmental problems.

A Social Policy Bond regime aiming at reducing air pollution, or environmental depredations in general, could be the answer. Such a regime would reward the achievement of our environmental goals, without specifying how those goals shall be achieved nor who shall achieve them. To see how the Social Policy Bond concept can be applied to environmental problems see here.

Targeting air pollution as a whole, rather than its more visible but less lethal components, would be an improvement over current policy. But perhaps an even better approach would be to target a range of broad indicators of health: see my essay here.