The Middle East and North African belt has 6 per cent of the world’s population and 1 per cent of the drinkable water resources, with an expanded desert area. It also has the highest rate of population growth.

Sustainable investors – those who think they can make money out of investing in green projects – tell us “we are long on short and short on long”.

Under the philosophy of creating shareholder value, corporate captains focus on short-term business models driven by quarterly profit reporting, instead of creating long-term value.

Most climate scientists think governments must do more to stop climate change. But both the culprits and possible saviours of global warming are our corporate leaders.

Politicians in democratic countries cannot deal with climate change because many owe their existence to corporate funding. If the corporate captains are not convinced they need to change course from short-term profits to long-term survival, then we are all on the SS Planet Titanic.

After all, the shareholders of the original Titanic thought the ship was unsinkable.

The Forbes list of 2000 leading global companies accounts for US$40 trillion in annual revenue, just under half of global gross domestic product, and US$186 trillion in global assets, larger than any single nation.

Collectively, these multinationals run the global supply chain and also shape demand for consumer goods through their control of advertising, social media and product design. If they truly care about climate change and social inclusivity, they, more than governments, can make a real difference.

So far, many pay lip service to climate change in their annual reports and corporate charity. But most have not seriously improved their carbon emissions or helped educate their customers on why changing consumption behaviour is in everyone’s best interest.

Meanwhile, the switch to green products and services may bring in US$1.2 trillion in revenue, seven times the costs of making the change.

Climate scientists urgently need to convince economists and policymakers that the issue is deadly serious.

Unfortunately, many mainstream macroeconomists remain convinced that carbon emissions are a “big externality” (market anomaly outside their main models), because growth and technology will somehow find the right solution.

The simple arithmetic is often ignored. The human population was 2 billion in 1900, and is now 7.6 billion, growing to perhaps 11 billion by the end of the century.

If every Chinese and Indian achieves the income level of and consumes resources like the average American per capita, we will need another Earth.

Economists are particularly blind to the impact of global warming and scarce resources because the originators of mainstream economics never lived under serious resource constraints. T

he British and then Americans benefited from fossil fuels powering the Industrial Revolution. Globalisation meant labour and natural resources, including oil and gas, could be imported from colonies into Europe. These non-renewable resources could be paid for by printing money.

Economists treat the Earth as a cost which does not need to be factored into GDP, the metric that measures “progress”. GDP does not reflect the cost of the tree that is cut down or the damage to the environment, only the cost of capital and labour involving in the cutting.

World Environment Day reminds us that we live collectively on a planet that is heating up. We are responsible for the carbon emissions that fuel global warming.

The right analogy for this situation is the “boiling frog” that remains complacent in warm water until it is too late, even though it could have jumped out had it really wanted to.

Can someone switch off the White House reality show and get on with the serious job of turning around SS Planet Titanic?

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective