New Green leaders - page 2

South Korea's new president, Lee Myung-bak, is also widely expected to make the environment a top concern of his administration. Lee was born into poverty, rose to the top of Hyundai, the country's largest conglomerate, and presided over Korea's headlong rush to industrialize, a time in which it quickly became a world leader in steel, petrochemicals and other heavy industry. Yet as a politician, it was Lee's efforts to green Seoul during his stint as mayor from 2002 to 2006 that brought him to national prominence. (His signature achievement: a campaign to clean a fetid waterway that had been buried beneath a concrete highway system in the 1970s.) Koreans share these priorities: a recent poll reported that 53 percent think environmental protection is more important than development.

Many Asian leaders, like Lee, still have one foot in the old world where economic growth was the measure of everything. That's especially true in China. By any measure, China's ecosystems are severely stressed, but President Hu Jintao has given signs that he understands how degraded China's environment has become, and that further damage could hobble the economy and trigger social unrest. He has unveiled ambitious policies to promote energy efficiency, created a "circular economy" based on sustainability and recycling, and begun to enact a climate-change policy "that is ahead of many other countries," argues Christine Loh, founder of the influential Hong Kong think tank Civic Exchange.

In rapidly industrializing nations like China, it is local pollution that drives environmentalism, but savvy leaders will need to harness that sentiment to make progress on the No. 1 international environmental issue: climate change. "Climate change is by far the biggest environmental issue of our time, and indeed of any time," says John Holdren, the director of the Science, Technology & Public Policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School. In the past, developing countries dragged their feet on this issue, arguing—not unreasonably—that climate change is a legacy of the West's industrialization, and that they must focus on economic development above all else. But at the Bali climate talks last year, "that really substantially turned around," Holdren says, largely because the effects of climate change are already being felt in the developing world in the form of droughts, storms and melting glaciers. "They're now saying, 'We understand that climate change is already harming us, and that a solution will have to include us'."

Rolling back climate change is a challenge that will test the resolve of today's green heads of state, who are less hard-core environmentalists than realists responding to new political truths. Rudd, for instance, supports logging in his country's old-growth forests—hardly a Greenpeace action item. China's leaders plan to install 30 gigawatts of wind power by 2020, but in 2006 added 90 gigawatts more of new coal-fired plants. That kind of dichotomy is likely to be a hallmark of the Age of Green. Just ask George Bush.

With William Underhill, B.J. Lee, Stefan Theil and Melinda Liu