Climate change is much-touted as the world's biggest potential threat. However, governments should pay as much attention to what is happening at ground level as in the sky above if they want their nations to be around in a century; unhealthy living is more likely to quickly bust budgets and kill off populations.
Globalisation is making increasing numbers better off, which with fast food and convenience stores on every corner and air-conditioned offices where long hours in front of computers is normal, can easily translate as being prone to diseases.
Top of the list are the illnesses of affluence - cancers, diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
That's what comes from smoking, poor eating habits and a lack of exercise. Western countries well know this; developing ones are now finding out the hard way.
Disease sufferers in developed countries are generally taken care of by their socialist-minded governments or company insurance schemes. Nations elsewhere, India and China chief among them, are rushing to develop so quickly they are ill prepared for the cost. Worse, they are not putting the warnings out to their people or taking preventative measures.
This has been highlighted graphically in a slew of reports in recent months by groups including the World Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. They reached the same conclusion: the costs of health care to treat the diseases of affluence and of lost productivity due to illness, can easily eat up several per cent of gross domestic product.
Diabetes is a case in point. The Economist Intelligence Unit estimates the cost of the disease to India is already this year equivalent to 2.1 per cent of GDP. Lost productivity costs alone for China were said to be 0.6 per cent of GDP. And to put the figures in perspective, in Britain, where 0.4 per cent of GDP was being taken each year due to the disease, the government last year spent about 0.35per cent of GDP on foreign economic aid and 0.76 per cent of GDP on tertiary education.