Lord Patten spelled out his ideas of the biggest risks facing the world to more than 350 delegates on the opening day of the World Insurance Forum in Dubai on Monday.

British futurologist James Martin, who has a home in Bermuda, then gave attendees more food for thought by portraying a future in which global warming makes some colder regions better places to live, while poorer areas become even poorer.

Former Governor of Hong Kong and ex-British Cabinet Minister Lord Patten described protectionist policies threatening global free trade as a key risk facing the world.

The candidates in the US presidential elections appeared keen to adopt protectionists measures as a populist measure, but to interfere with free trade would not solve US economic problems, he said, and could provoke retaliation from other countries and the European Union (EU).

The relations between the Islamic world and the west was Lord Patten's second major global risk, with the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Turkey's application to join the EU as potential flashpoints.

Global warming was his third major risk, outweighing terrorism, he said. "Is there a terrorist capable of melting the permafrost?" Lord Patten asked.

Nuclear proliferation was another very real risk, he added. "There will be a great reliance on nuclear power in the future, as a way of dealing with climate change," Lord Patten said. "The more we rely on nuclear power, the more nuclear technology will spread."

Non-proliferation treaties and nuclear test bans had to be enforced more widely, he said, as the risk of a terrorist group buying or stealing a nuclear weapon grew.

His fifth big risk was failed or failing states, such as Sudan or Burma, where government was dysfunctional and terrorist groups could potentially thrive. "You can't build a wall around them," Lord Patten said.

Dr. Martin's vision of the future also touched on risk and said that small changes made now to address problems such as a growing population and climate change could greatly reduce the scale of what we need to do to save the planet in future.

Population is expected to grow from six billion to nine billion by 2040, Dr. Martin said. In the meantime the planet's ability to feed us all will diminish.

Every year the world loses 24 billion tonnes of topsoil and 160 billion tons of water from aquifers, underground lakes which are a major supply of fresh water all over the world.

While we pump 20 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, we also diminish the planet's ability to absorb it, by losing 44 million acres of forest and seeing the formation of 15 million acres of new desert.

The richest manufacturing businesses would be making the smallest things, he added, with nanotechnology and biotechnology becoming huge growth industries.

One positive effect of global warming would be the enhanced ability of tundra to grow crops, with areas like Siberia and Canada becoming bread baskets. The other side of the coin is that life would become less bearable in the hot regions where most of the world's poor live, exacerbating global poverty.

If the human population were to start falling instead of climbing, ur future would be much brighter, he added.

Man's impact on the global environment was the topic for one of the afternoon sessions, as Dr. Martin was joined by Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) director Anthony Knap, director of the Policy Foresight Programme Sir Crispin Tickell, and Dr. Charles Kennel, professor of atmospheric science at the Schripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California.

The message from those speakers was that we have to act immediately and significantly to avoid environmental disaster.

"In the past, there have been natural fluctuations in levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," Sir Crispin said. "But there is more carbon dioxide in the air now than there has been for 650,000 years. I don't think there is any argument anymore about whether man's actions are causing that."

Dr. Kennel said: "One of the reasons it's such a serious problem is that a carbon molecule in the atmosphere has a 50-percent chance of being there in 50 years and three-percent chance of being there in 1,000 years."

Dr. Knap said there was an urgent need to "get that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere else", with the ocean being his suggestion. A need to come up with a workable carbon trading system was also essential.