There is an old belief that solving environmental problems can only be achieved by first building enough economic wealth so we can 'afford to save the environment.' This 'Kuznets Curve' thinking has never been correct and must be abandoned once and for all if we are serious about economic development for a thriving humanity on Earth.

Beyond reducing individual use, one of our top priorities must be to move from fossil fuels to energy that has fewer detrimental effects on water supplies and fewer environmental impacts overall.

Climate change is hugely exacerbated by changing patterns of how we choose to live, often in danger zones such as extremely vulnerable coastal zones - from New Jersey to the Philippines. This enormously increases the economic and human costs of hurricanes, rising seas and changing weather patterns.

Any regeneration project that fails to put environmental and social benefits at its very heart is unlikely to achieve anything more than a very short-lived spasm of spurious prosperity

Environmental protection doesn't happen in a vacuum. You can't separate the impact on the environment from the impact on our families and communities.

Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us.