I was with Ted Turner when he came to see Kofi Annan - the Secretary-General of the UN - to announce his decision to put $1 billion to the service of UN projects and programs.

What pleases me most is that sustainable development is on almost everybody's agenda now.

The Prime Minister of India, at a meeting that I co-chaired a few months ago, stated that any development that is not sustainable is not development.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

Also, it is interesting that developing countries, with China and India perhaps in the lead, where the future of the global environment will be decided are now on board with the case for sustainable development.

In addition to this, they already have a fuel cell car on the road in Japan. It is subsidized from within the corporation because they are still at a high cost.

The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.