About a year ago Zhou Shengxian, the head of China's recently created Environment Ministry wrote: "In China's thousands of years of civilisation the conflict between humanity and nature has never been as serious as it is today." China's problems of rivers and reservoirs drying up - driven in part by its rush to build economic and physical infrastructure - is a more acute manifestation of climate change and economic development than here in the UK. But the perceived conflict between a sustainable environment and GDP growth is surely the most difficult and complex issue which confronts us today. This is all the more apparent when the planet's population is projected to increase by an additional two billion people to nine billion by the year 2050, including three billion new middle class consumers.