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With the international community galvanised to look for ways to solve the current financial crisis, it appears that other problems have been relegated to the backburner. That could have dire consequences in the long term, especially if the problem is that of climate change, says Rob Routs, Executive Director Downstream, Royal Dutch Shell.

"Here we are talking in a middle of a crisis about things that have happened to us over the last seven to eight years. And we're all bystanders, looking at it while it happened ... The way we want to address issues like this is by crisis, because if we don't have a crisis we don't get the attention of the world focused on this kind of stuff to make a

change," says Routs, who was a speaker at the INSEAD Leadership Summit Asia 2008.

He cautions that global warming is unlike a financial crisis, in that it is neither cyclical nor reversible. "Energy demand between now and 2050 is going to grow by a factor of two; there simply is not enough supply to make up for that demand ... As water levels are going to rise, these are not things which you can reverse in two or three years like we would believe you can do in a financial crisis. These are things that are going to take 30 to 50 years to reverse and (by then) you are in a very different position."

The green movement