2008 may prove to be a watershed year with food and fuel crises swiftly followed by a financial one. Faced with the Great Depression President Franklin D Roosevelt rapidly adopted his famous recovery-focused New Deal. It set the stage for the biggest economic growth the world has seen. Today we need similar vision, urgent action and strong political engagement to direct financial flows and manage markets to deal with the even greater global challenges of our time. These range from climate change; poverty; job creation for the 1.3 billion people under or unemployed and accelerating natural resource scarcity to the need to fuel and to feed six billion, rising to nine billion people by 2050. Image source: unep.org.

Source: UNEP