'Tipping point'

As Mr Obama becomes the 44th president, one of his toughest challenges is also his greatest opportunity.

The world needs US leadership to begin honestly accounting for the state our natural assets

The global environment is rapidly reaching a tipping point, much like our global economy.

Once it passes that point, it will be all the more difficult to pull it back to stability.

Our Earth is being altered to the point where it cannot sustain much of the life that has thrived for millennia; species extinctions today are occurring at an estimated 1,000 times the normal rate.

When our landscapes, rivers and coral reefs can no longer sustain robust species populations, humans are also in trouble.

People depend on healthy ecosystems for the very fundamentals of survival: clean air, fresh water, soil regeneration, crop pollination and other resources that we often take for granted until they are scarce or gone.

Just as the current financial crisis reveals how the world's economies are interconnected, we also must recognise the fundamental links between human well-being and Earth's ecosystems.

When we abuse and degrade the natural world, it affects our health, our social stability and our wallets.

Western Europe could face higher temperatures in the next few years as governments clean up acid rain, according to scientists at Britain's Meteorological Office.

Global warming, evident over most of the rest of the planet in the past decade, has so far been 'slow or absent' over the northwest Atlantic and Western Europe, according to the conclusions of a revised assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released last week. A prime reason has been the shielding from the Sun's heat provided by sulphur emissions from power stations, one of the main sources of acid rain.