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

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.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

If you want to maintain a sustainable supply of fish you have to farm the fish, rather than mine them. So putting your money into fishing fleets that are going to exacerbate the problem by over-fishing is not the way to preserve the underlying asset.

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.

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.

A citizen of an advanced industrialized nation consumes in six months the energy and raw materials that have to last the citizen of a developing country his entire lifetime.