An exhibition at Beit Al Quran, organised jointly by the Beit and the British Council, entitled North, South, East, West, continues until June 5.

Today, the Bahrain Businessmen's Association (BBA) is holding a seminar on the Economics of Climate Change, jointly sponsored by Hidd Power Company and International Power.

This event is aimed particularly at the business community and will be addressed via video link by experts from London.

Climate change is of critical, even existential, importance to us all.

In the Gulf, we live in one of the most politically volatile regions on earth. The tensions between states in the region, the violence and inter-communal strife in Iraq, in the Occupied Territories and in Lebanon, affect all of our lives and have the potential to de-stabilise the wider region.

We all hope that in time solutions will be found to these problems and that the people currently suffering so much will again know peace, prosperity and stability.

But even if this happy state is achieved, the greatest of all threats to the region and the world may still loom over us: climate change.

If it is not confronted, all of our lives and livelihoods, whether we live in the Middle East, Europe or anywhere else in the world, will be changed for the worse.

For many people, global warming could even cost them their lives.

The photographs at the North, South, East, West exhibition are powerful and will, I believe, stir two strong emotions:

Despair, when you see the extent to which the glaciers of Greenland have retreated or the lands around Mount Kilimanjaro, some of the richest reservoirs of wildlife on earth, have dried.

Hope, when you see some of the remedies to climate change that new technology and imaginative policies offer us.

This is the key message that we should take away from this exhibition: that while climate change has already had a devastating impact on the earth, it is within our power to head off its worst effects without paying a high price, through technology and through relatively small changes to the ways in which we live and work.

There is a tendency to discuss climate change as if we have two choices: continue as we are now, drive for economic growth and face catastrophe in a few decades time, or dramatically slow down our economic growth and our development and tolerate the short-term pain that results. Neither of these options is appealing. Practical politics means that the latter course is not even feasible.

Is an unemployed man with a large family really going to accept that the threat to his family posed by, for example, rising sea levels in 10 or 20 years, is more important than having his children fed and housed today? Will he vote for anyone who advocates such a policy?

The alternative faces the challenge of climate change full on and allows economic growth.

Small changes in our lifestyles, such as not leaving electronic devices on standby, recycling waste and replacing regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones can significantly reduce a community's energy consumption.

Many companies now find that an environmentally friendly ethic can actually help them grow.

There is a very good example here in Bahrain. Hidd Power Company (HPC), one of the joint sponsors of the BBA event, operates a gas turbine plant which meets international environmental standards for emissions and perhaps even more importantly makes optimum use of the gas it burns.

This means that the CO2 produced is minimised for the amount of electricity and water supplied.

In fact, the energy efficiency of the plant exceeds 50 per cent, compared to typical conventional oil or coal plant efficiency of under 40pc.

This enables HPC, and other new plants, to contribute to the economic growth of Bahrain whilst minimising its environmental impact, particularly its carbon footprint.

Environmental business itself is now huge: the global market is worth $515 billion now and predicted to be worth $688bn in 2010.

This will put it into the same league as the pharmaceutical and aerospace industries.

In the UK, the environment industry accounts for 170,000 jobs.

Western Europe, Japan and North America currently account for 85pc of the global environmental market, but in the Beit Al Quran exhibition you will see examples of new technology in the developing world.

While these projects are mainly small scale now, the share of the global market for other regions and developing countries is predicted to rise.

At a national level, some of the world's more successful economies, for example Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic and the UK are built on environmentally sustainable policies.

All of these are issues that will be explored at the BBA seminar.

In his report earlier this year Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, asserted that the cost of taking the steps necessary to hold off the worst effects of climate change need cost around only 1pc of global gross domestic product (GDP).

Of course, this is a substantial sum of money in real terms. But it is not so much as it would halt economic growth.

It is much less than the devastating 20pc reduction in GDP that could occur over the next few decades if we do nothing.

Climate change can be tackled. The environment can be protected. Economic growth can continue. All of these are achievable at the same time.

Today, Bahraini business people will have the opportunity to discuss how. And I encourage you to see the photographs at the exhibition. They are magnificent."