Give me 30 seconds,
And I can give you a list of 30 terrifying challenges
facing humanity and the planet at this point in history.
And we wouldn't sleep tonight.
There are so many of them, and they seem to be so frightening
It's not really surprising
that many of us are feeling a little bit disheartened,
and a little bit anxious at the moment.
But the way I see it -
There are really only two things
stopping the world working at the moment
The first one is the fact that the countries don't collaborate enough.
We know the solutions to most of those challenges.
But we don't implement them because we don't work together.
And the second thing that stopping the world working properly
is the fact that every single one of those challenges
has been caused by the behaviour of human beings.
And if we can change that we can change everything.
Now those sound like big tasks and they are.
But I'm optimistic.
For the last 10 years, I've been working on projects and plans and policies.
to try and attack those two barriers to making the world work better.
Some of them I tried to encourage countries to implement.
But the coolest ones, I keep and I try to do them myself.
So I'd like to tell you two of those in the few minutes that I've got today.
The first one is more of an update.
It's a project called the Good Country Index, which I launched back in 2014.
I haven't spoken about it for a while, but it has been through 4 different editions.
And I thought it would be good to give an update.
So the Good Country Index is an attempt to measure what every country on earth
gives to the rest of the world
outside of its own borders,
a kind of balance sheet for the world if you like.
A lot of people, when I originally launched it said
not another country index, surely there are enough of those around already.
But the interesting thing is that almost all of the others look inwards.
They treat countries as if they were little islands
inhabiting their own private oceans.
But surely that doesn't really make sense.
Because everything everybody does has an impact on all of us, always.
If one country pollutes the air or water, that's our air and our water.
If they go to war, drags other countries in
and the refugees pour out.
There is really nothing you can do any more
So what the good country index attempts to do
is to make a start towards helping people to understand
that this is an interconnected system
by measuring what each country contributes to the rest of the world.
Now, it's not my opinion which countries rank higher and which ones rank lower.
It's formed from a set of 35 large databases,
which mostly come from the UN system.
And what they do is they simply measure the positive and negative effects
that the countries have.
It's always been a tiny bit controversial.
But that's kind of good,
because it helps to start a new kind of argument.
In fact, it works really well.