The view from Nairobi -


THE federal Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, has gone to the United Nations climate change conference in Nairobi to present Australia's case for a new agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions which would cover all the big polluting countries. He can expect scepticism when he gets there. As one of the two developed countries holding out against the Kyoto Protocol on global warming - the other being the United States - Australia is not in good standing when the world discusses threats to the environment.
His argument at first glance seems sound. Australia wants any post-Kyoto agreement to include all major emitters of greenhouse gases. China (which has ratified Kyoto) is likely to be the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by 2010. India, too, is climbing rapidly up the same destructive league table. Any new agreement on measures to counter climate change will have to include those two countries - and all the developing world, too - if it is to have an effect. Yet Australia's stance looks disingenuous. To the rest of the world it seems designed with failure in mind, so our energy-hungry industries can continue unimpeded. Kyoto - which constrains only developed countries - was specifically intended as a first step towards a world agreement, not the final step.
By not taking even that first step in the direction the world believes is right, Australia has set its face against the whole process. Expecting the whole world - developed, undeveloped and in between - to start in uniformity to deal with a formidably complex problem which has overwhelmingly been produced by emissions from developed countries is simply unreasonable. Though it may suit Australia's big energy users, there is a countervailing group which is growing increasingly worried about environmental issues - the voting public.
While the Prime Minister, John Howard, remains deeply sceptical about the issue, the Treasurer, Peter Costello, appears more aware of public anxiety, and to be positioning himself as less hardline. At the weekend he declared that as the world moves towards a system of trading carbon credits, Australia could not stand against it. It is not much of a shift: Mr Costello downplayed any urgency, and his position can still be represented as consistent with the Government's general approach, which is to sit on its hands. But his remarks push along the idea of Australia's involvement in carbon trading. That is welcome, because harnessing market forces for environmental damage-control looks to be the best hope for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. It remains to be seen, of course, whether Australia will be allowed much of a say in determining the shape of any carbon trading system while it remains contemptuous of international agreements on climate change.

For the present, our leaders seem content to treat global warming and the environment as non-core issues - to be managed by soothing public unease with cheap, feel-good projects such as yesterday's announcement that Blacktown will be the state's first solar city. They may find themselves left behind by the people they are supposed to be leading. Like the effects of climate change, the politics of global warming may not change gradually, but be subject to sudden, large shifts.
Don't sit there, do something
MODERN life would make you sick. As the Herald showed in its series Sick Cities earlier this year, urban living taken as a whole is causing a decline in public health, and will quite possibly lead to a reduction in life-expectancy in coming years. Chief among the ailments afflicting rapidly growing numbers of people is type 2 diabetes. Though the problem is clear and growing, a comprehensive solution to it is not.
It is not just Australia or even solely wealthy Western countries which are affected. Experts at the International Diabetes Federation conference in Melbourne are warning of a global pandemic of type 2 diabetes. The figures are frightening: moving from the country to a city of more than a million people quadruples an individual's chances of contracting diabetes. The disease afflicts indigenous populations more severely than neighbouring Caucasian populations already; left unchecked, it threatens to destroy indigenous populations completely. The federation's new president, Professor Martin Silink, predicts that in some societies the disease and its complications will place such a burden on health care systems that they will collapse.
Indigenous populations - the subject of the Melbourne conference - have problems peculiar to them alone, but it is instructive that those living a traditional lifestyle - physically active and eating high-nutrient, low-energy foods - are far less susceptible to the disease. For Western populations, of course, there is no such thing as a traditional lifestyle. Yet the severity of the onset of diabetes in the past decade is a recent phenomenon which suggests that lifestyles in the not-too-distant past were healthier. It is the combination of recent trends in diet, transport, architecture and town planning which have produced an inactive population which is now able to make unhealthy choices in almost every area. Unhealthy choices have been made cheaper, easier and more convenient than healthy ones, and the need for healthy activity - walking to school or the shops, for example - has been gradually eliminated.
Governments must act to counter this disease of modernity, but they cannot possibly do it alone. Planning rules will need to be modified with a view to creating walking communities. Public transport needs to be encouraged at the expense of the car. But the staggering complexity of modern life will take many years and a lot of resources to unravel in the interest of improved health - if, indeed, it can be unravelled. Until that happens - if it ever does - individuals must also take responsibility for the choices they make.