Profit vs sustainability: How to manage the conflict

THIS year may well go down as the year the world really started to wake up to the implications of climate change. More than half the planet's population has directly felt the effects of rising temperatures. Scarcity - and extreme excess - of water hit more than the poorest. Many began to understand that something was going wrong. Even President Donald Trump, the champion of denial about climate problems, declared his hand by offering to buy Greenland, possibly the last habitable country if rising temperatures continue at their present pace.

Encouragingly, people started to respond with behavioural changes. These behaviour changes are occurring in other areas too. For example, medical research has revealed more about the body and the brain. This has led to more people participating in regular exercise and having a sensible diet with greatly reduced smoking and alcohol intake, resulting in a healthier old age - a time for which prudent business was starting to cater.

The decline in alcohol consumption was considerable. Drunkenness shifted from illegal, if dangerous, to socially unacceptable - not totally, of course, but significantly enough to make it clear that society's norms in drinking countries were changing. A healthy lifestyle became the acceptable face of most societies.