Our bad record on emissions makes our challenge tougher

Our international obligations to reduce this country’s contribution to global climate change pose a real and immediate challenge, writes Dick Warner

We no longer live in a world where we can ingratiate our way forward by pleading we are a small country trying to fight our way out of a recession by producing lots of healthy green beef and milk. We are going to have to make some quite drastic changes to our lifestyles and to the way we manage our countryside.

The World Resources Institute monitors greenhouse gas emissions country by country and publishes the results. In a list of emissions per person for 285 countries, starting with the worst and ending with the best, we are at number 21. The countries that are even worse than us make up a rather odd list. Wealthy industrialised countries like the US, Canada and Australia are understandable but most of the Gulf States are in there, along with a number of Caribbean Islands, and the worst offender is the tiny central American state of Belize. In the EU the only countries worse than Ireland are Estonia and Luxembourg.