7
Social Responsibility

Just Business

Over the years, we've watched billions of dollars go into development aid and emergency relief. Yet, unbelievably, we still have well over 16,000 people dying every day from preventable and treatable diseases like Aids and TB, half the planet still lives on less than $2 per day, one billion people have no access to drinking water, and the list goes on and on. The fact that these problems persist is not due to lack of hard work and commitment from the social and environmental sectors; nevertheless, without normal market forces and businesses ensuring that the best ideas can be fully realised and communicated, what we end up with is a market of good intentions.

Through my travels over the last couple of decades, I've started to realise that the only way we are going to drive the scale of the change we need in the world is if we pull together some very unlikely partnerships with businesses, charities, governments, NGOs and entrepreneurial people on to the front lines. More often than not, the people most affected know the answers – we just need to listen to them. None of us can do it alone; we all have to put aside our differences and revolutionise the way we work together to ensure that we leave this world in good shape for at least the 'next seven generations', as is the philosophy of the indigenous people we are working with in Canada.

In this last chapter, I want to tell you about Virgin's adventures in the territory where business and making the world a bit of a better place meet. This has always been important to me and really began when I was eighteen and opened up the Student Advisory Centre on Portobello Road, helping young people with sexual health. Forty years later, it has changed shape a bit, but it's still there, and still in the same place offering counselling services.

When Aids first started to become a major issue in the mid-eighties we launched Mates condoms, combining our business and creative skills to get young people to wear a condom while still enjoying sex (well they certainly weren't going to be stopped!). We decided that this was so important that we would make it a social business and all profits would be ploughed back into extending the safe-sex message. The team did a great job. We even got the BBC to run an advertising campaign for the first time in their history, which significantly raised awareness of the importance of safe sex across the UK – all in a cheeky Virgin way. Here in the Caribbean, the slogan goes: 'No glove – no love'.

Several years ago, I realised that if Virgin really wanted to make a difference with some of the tougher issues facing humanity, we had to start pulling together everything we were doing. I knew that the only way this would work was if we put social responsibility at the core of what Virgin is. So we spent months talking with staff, customers and front-line organisations all over the world, and out of this we built a company philosophy of 'doing what is best for people and the planet' and created Virgin Unite. Virgin Unite has now become the entrepreneurial foundation of the group, working with our businesses and partners to develop new approaches to tackle the tough issues. It's really about ideas and people – finding the best of both and then helping them to scale up. Our fundamental belief is that doing good is great for business. It's not about the 'golden charitable cheque' but, rather, it's about making sure that we leverage everything we have across our businesses – especially the wonderful entrepreneurial spirit of our people – to drive change.

There is such a thing as enlightened self-interest, and we should encourage it. It is possible to turn a profit while making the world a better place. And, inasmuch as there can ever be answers to the problems of the world, capitalism – generously and humanely defined and humbly working with others who understand the issues and solutions – can create some of those answers. More about Virgin's ventures in this area later, but first I want to tell you about some of the people who have inspired me.

We've had many impressive and influential people come and stay with us on Necker Island. But the visit of Bill and Melinda Gates at Easter in 2001 provided me with plenty of inspiration for what I should be doing in a philanthropic way.

It takes a bit of time to get to know Bill Gates. He's cerebral and intense about all he does. This intensity made for an excellent game of tennis which ended in an honourable draw.

During his visit he spoke to me a great deal about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in 2008 had assets of $37.6 billion, making it the world's largest charity and a force for immense good in troubled parts of the world. In 2006, the foundation handed out $1.54 billion in grants in three areas: global health, global education and programmes in America, including the creation of forty-three new high schools in New York City.

I wrote in my notebook: 'He's very involved with it. Not just giving way billions but reading up about African diseases and seriously trying to help with Aids/malaria/tuberculosis and educating people to use condoms.'

At that time, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had just overtaken, in the value of its trust fund, the Wellcome Trust – one of the UK's long-established charities, which has funded research into human and animal health since 1936 and was spending £650 million a year. Since then, the Foundation has grown dramatically and is now, by far, the largest charitable foundation in the world, alleviating poverty, disease and ignorance around the globe. Bill and Melinda have done such a brilliant job as 'venture philanthropists' that Warren Buffett, who pipped Gates in 2008 as the world's richest man, handed over much of his substantial wealth for them to look after.

My wife Joan didn't know what to make of Bill at first, though she warmed to him and enjoyed spending time with his wife, Melinda. Melinda was then in her late thirties, a charming and intelligent woman. She had amassed a huge amount of knowledge about malaria-carrying mosquitoes, tuberculosis, Aids and rotavirus, a severe form of diarrhoea that kills more than 500,000 infants a year. Effectively she was giving Bill a running personal tutorial on some of the key issues in global health. While Bill was interested in the actual microbiological science of vaccine research and finding a scientific solution, Melinda wanted to alleviate as much suffering as possible now.

I went sailing with Bill – discovering to my surprise that he used to race sailing boats – and he told me about the Microsoft Xbox, which he was about to launch on to the market to take on the Sony PlayStation. 'It's the biggest thing I've ever done,' he said. But he was thoughtful, and I sensed that his mission in life was changing. He had achieved so much with Microsoft, building it to become one of the most powerful businesses on the planet. In little more than twenty years he had changed the face of the modern world. Now he was turning his formidable brain to solving some of the apparently intractable problems facing our Earth. He told me he went to see Nelson Mandela. 'I said: "Most people think you're a saint. Tell me the truth. Did you hate the people who put you in prison?"'

'Yes, I did,' was the answer to Bill's question. 'For twelve years I lived off those people and I hated them. Then I realised they couldn't take my mind or my heart away.'

Bill was astounded and said meeting Mandela was a seminal point in his life: 'He taught me about living.'

That must have been quite a moment: the richest human in the world talks to the most revered human and acquires a new purpose and a challenge in his life. I think it may eventually go into the history books as a turning point – the start of something big.

In January 2008, Bill Gates was a guest at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in Switzerland. He said: 'We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.' He has called this idea 'creative capitalism', saying that by harnessing the basic factor that drives capitalism – self-interest – creative capitalism can enhance the interests of the giver and the recipient.

I agree. I think capitalism is a proven system: it works. But it has got a lot of faults. Breathtaking wealth goes to relatively few people. This would not matter so much, were it not for the fact that the very poorest in society are destitute, lacking even the basic amenities for survival. This being the case, an enormous responsibility falls on a successful business leader. Leaders need to reinvest their wealth by creating new jobs or by tackling the social problems of the world (ideally, both – which is what makes Muhammad Yunus's microcredit movement so exciting).

History has thrown up no viable alternative to the free exchange of capital, goods and services, and the enterprise of law-abiding people. But capitalism as an ideology needs work and reform. Capitalism has to be more than the survival of the fittest.

My own fairly unexceptional view is that capitalism should pay far more attention to people and to the resources of this planet. I call it 'Gaia capitalism' for short, and as a tribute to the work of Professor James Lovelock, who has spent a lifetime tracing the life-sustaining connections between the living and non-living parts of the Earth. Human behaviour and human capital have to work with our planet.

More generally, entrepreneurs and wealth creators around the world must be a positive force for good. There is nothing unbusiness-like about sharing the benefits of your industry with happy, fulfilled people and a planet that is going to be there in all its glory for our children and grandchildren.

In 1997, while proposing a lottery scheme in Johannesburg, I called upon the world's business community to run their companies more ethically – and, to get the ball rolling, to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to bribery. Perhaps the most unethical and dangerous abuse of a company's financial muscle around the world is the use of bribes to secure contracts. If company directors bribe politicians they start a rot at the very top. Police, customs officers, tax officials and the judiciary will then start saying to themselves: if our bosses are accepting bribes, why shouldn't we?

In my speech, I kept my definition of ethics simple. Business ethics interest me, and ethical questions are less complex than some academics on business courses make out. I said we should all pledge to do nothing that we'd regret reading about in the press. In the developed world, we're extremely fortunate in having a free press. Being misquoted or misinterpreted can be frustrating, and a bad journalist can do a lot of damage, but set against the big picture, these are really just inconveniences. A free press is a society's conscience. You may, for instance, be trying to discourage a competitor. A scheme is sitting on your desk that would undoubtedly work. But it rides close to the wind. These things can get complicated, so you can't rely entirely on gut instinct. If the public and the media got to read this document, what would they do? Would they shrug, or laugh at your cheek – or would you and your company be vilified?

As we work to improve and reform capitalism, I think this connection between free commerce and free expression will become ever more evident. And whilst having a free press is a wonderful check, ideally it will be needed less and less as a conscience as we all start putting the well-being of people and the environment at the core of our business.

In June 1999, Nelson Mandela invited me to his leaving party and to the inauguration of his successor, Thabo Mbeki. At the banquet, my neighbour, a doctor, told me about her hospital – which receives more patients than any other in the world – and I agreed to visit.

The next morning I went to Soweto. After the previous evening's pomp and glamour, I was brought back down to earth with an incredible bump. The hospital was worse than she had described. The accident and emergency section was like a Vietnam War movie. The queue for medicines stretched for half a mile. I have a deep respect for South Africa and I wanted to help so much. This was a country with fabulous potential and people who were so warm and friendly. Yet a staggering 20 per cent of female South Africans coming into antenatal clinics now had HIV, she told me, and medicines were just not going to the people who needed them. We had already done some work with HIV/Aids in the UK and I was now determined to do everything in my power to stop this unnecessary human suffering in South Africa.

For some years, Virgin had been investing in companies to help drive the South African economy. Virgin Unite had also started to look at creating opportunities for young South Africans. One of my favourite examples of this is the Branson School of Entrepreneurship at the CIDA City Campus. This took off when CIDA's charismatic leader, Taddy Blecher, literally chased Jean and me down the street to sell me on the idea of forming a partnership to assist financially disadvantaged young people to start up their own businesses. As I write this, I have just spent my birthday with some students at the school. Their energy and positive spirit always inspires and humbles me. One after the other, they got up and talked about their small businesses, which began as part of the Branson School and now gave economic freedom not only to these young people, but also to their families and communities. This was the best birthday gift I could have asked for! I wrote down the following quote from one of them in my notebook:

One thing that I like about the Branson School is that it's a place where you feel like when you're there you get inspired – there's that inspiration that is drawn from the Branson School. You're always excited. The moment you get there, you forget your problems, and you just focus on growing your business. To all the beautiful Virgin people, I would like to wish you guys all the best, and I need to tell you something. Please keep on supporting the Branson School. We love you. Thank you.

Even with this incredible next generation of South Africans starting to build a positive future, I could see that Aids was sapping the country's ability to function properly. A vibrant and dynamic economy needs healthy people to maintain the fabric of society for those who are ill, infirm and disabled, but there is a tipping point beyond which the levels of disease and death are so debilitating that any kind of enterprise is impossible. This was the situation that I could foresee arising in South Africa. And I wasn't doing nearly enough about it yet.

For me it was the story of Donald Makhubele, one of the waiters at our Virgin game reserve, Ulusaba, that gave the tragedy of Aids a human face. Donald was a poet and musician, a wonderful character who wrote eloquently about the local land and its people – and about his illness. His own testament was deeply humbling. He said: 'I'm a songwriter who writes about HIV and Aids . . . Let us work together as one, to be proud of ourselves and have the same purpose in order to defeat the enemy. This is not a disease but it is a war that is in Africa, aiming to destroy our continent.'

Donald died of Aids-induced tuberculosis. When he passed away I pledged that no other Virgin employee would die unnecessarily. I thought it was wrong that any of the hundreds of foreign companies operating in Africa should allow their people to die of Aids, and the same should apply to local companies.

At Ulusaba, we first had to show that we had no inhibitions about HIV. Nelson Mandela had told me about a time when he had visited some Aids orphans who lived in a hut. Instead of throwing the food over a fence, he ventured in and spent some time with the girls. As he walked back to the car, his driver was so scared of catching something from him that he jumped out of the car and ran away. He said that Princess Diana had done more than anyone by cuddling a young child with HIV – this simple act had been a huge positive step forward in Africa.

So Joan and I invited a wonderful doctor and extraordinary social entrepreneur, Hugo Templeman, to come and see us. We then gathered all our staff at the game reserve and took an HIV/Aids test in front of them. We tried to encourage as many people as possible to come forward and also take the test – and most of them did. Afterwards, we invited some young people with HIV to speak to all of us about how antiretroviral drugs had saved their lives.

In 2005, Virgin Unite worked with a partner to fund two films, created by Africans and translated into multiple languages, to show how the HIV/Aids drugs worked and how the human immune system worked. In one of our African businesses we found that 24 per cent of our staff had HIV, which meant nearly a quarter would die within six or seven years without drug treatment. I was shocked – yet we were typical of so many other businesses working across Africa.

I said our organisation would supply anybody working for us with free antiretroviral drugs. And then we rolled out the 0% Challenge across the whole of our Virgin business: that no staff should ever die from Aids, that no one else would become HIV positive, that no HIV-positive pregnant mothers would pass on HIV to their baby and that we would have zero tolerance towards any type of discrimination against people who were HIV positive. The 0% Challenge is not only helping to stop needless suffering, but also makes absolute sense for our business to ensure we keep our people happy and healthy.

I went on a tour of local projects fighting the spread of HIV and Aids. We asked to spend time visiting as many clinics as possible to see first hand the medical crisis – I was already well acquainted with the facts and figures of the situation, but I was keen to gain a better impression of the scale of the epidemic.

The images of that tour are still too harrowing for words. In clinic after clinic, the vision of hell was clear for all to see. The sight of row upon row of near skeletons, both men and women, often with their babies and children by the bed, was utterly appalling. And the waiting rooms were full of people waiting to get into beds where people had died just hours before. These were not hospitals. They were places where people went to die. And yet we knew that this problem could be tackled. We even knew how.

I wrote in my notebook: 'A pregnant mother with HIV or Aids giving birth to her child is likely to give that child HIV. For as little as fifty US cents the mother can be given medicine six weeks prior to birth, and the baby can have an injection six weeks after birth, and nearly 100 per cent of such children lead a normal life, free of HIV.' Yet very few pregnant women in South Africa had access to these lifesaving drugs.

All this troubled me deeply. As I returned regularly to South Africa to build up our companies, it seemed as if the HIV/Aids epidemic was getting worse. Since the first case in 1982, millions had died and the prevalence in South Africa was higher than anywhere else in the world. By 2006, the incidence rate in South Africa was up to around 29 per cent for females coming into antenatal clinics.

Those who know they have HIV must be given hope. They can't be consigned to a living death and told that their life will be extinguished in a horrible way in five years – seven if they're lucky. Antiretroviral drugs are a lifesaver. Before our zero tolerance campaign had started, one of our employees at Ulusaba had been reduced almost to a skeleton – he was barely a day away from death – when we managed to obtain the right drugs for him. A month later, he was back to normal weight. Three months later, he was back at work. If antiretroviral drugs are used properly, a person can live a full life. The drugs also cut dramatically the chance of that person spreading the disease. We decided to use our business skills to partner with some great organisations and come up with ways to help stop this health emergency. One of my thoughts was to help build clinics that can sustain themselves over time and start to administer drugs and ensure that condoms are distributed. Virgin Unite teamed up with Hugo Templeman, plus Brian Brink from Anglo American plc, the South African government and the US President's Emergency Programme for Aids Relief to set up the Bhubezi Community Health Care Centre in Mpumalanga – a brilliant example of the kind of public and private partnership that really works, where local health officials and the business community are working hand in glove to fight Aids more effectively.

Hugo's idea was to create a one-stop-shop for primary health care, to include a pharmacy, X-ray and obstetrics facilities, an HIV/Aids patient care clinic, and a laboratory. Hugo had not only built such a centre; he had helped create an entire economic infrastructure with basic utilities such as water, electricity, roads and even a bakery, a car wash and a nappy-manufacturing factory! Bhubezi was a great opportunity for Hugo to develop and extend his ideas.

In 2006, I returned to open the Bhubezi centre. In the interim, thousands more people had suffered and died from Aids and thousands more had become infected with HIV. Of course, I wasn't alone in my concern. There were dozens and dozens of worthy and learned organisations and donor countries working to eradicate Aids. In fact, the number of organisations actually helping out was crippling some of the effectiveness on the front lines. We spoke to one doctor who said that 40 per cent of his time and his staff's time was spent on managing over a hundred different funders. With this in mind, I worked with Virgin Unite to look at how we could set up a 'War Room' for sub-Saharan Africa to help better coordinate and mobilise resources in the fight against diseases.

During my trip in 2006, after some incredibly emotional visits to hospices and still angry at myself for letting Donald die, I decided that I could no longer be silent about the issue. Much to the dismay of the Virgin Unite team, who were worried that this would slow down or shut down our ability to progress with some of the projects, I went on national TV stating that I felt the leader of South Africa and his health minister were guilty of genocide and should be tried for crimes against humanity.

The next morning – 27 October 2006 – the Financial Mail reported: 'British billionaire Richard Branson has slammed President Thabo Mbeki and health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for presiding over "a government [that] is effectively killing its own people".'

I stared at the report. Here I was, a supposedly non-political industry figure, commenting on key political figures in a country where I was doing business. From a purely commercial perspective, it certainly wasn't wise. But I felt, and still feel, it's more important to do what you believe to be right in life, and if this contradicts your business interests, so be it. Business can't be allowed to float above ordinary morality.

But this wasn't about me. This was about a country and a people and, yes, a leadership that I loved. I wanted the ANC to be remembered for the good work it had done for the country, not for turning a blind eye and effectively killing a large percentage of the population by refusing to accept that HIV and Aids are linked.

I immediately received a letter from President Mbeki and, much to his credit, he did not condemn me for speaking out, but instead engaged in a dialogue about what he felt needed to be done. He also offered an honest perspective on his views of the issues that South Africa was facing, from HIV to the lack of job opportunities. After several open and frank communications, we both had the guts to put our differences aside and agree to partner up on building the war room to tackle disese in sub-Saharan Africa. This was the first step on a journey that we hope will make a great difference. As I write this, I have just joined Priya Bery and Jean Oelwang from Virgin Unite for a week of meetings with the ANC government, some amazing South African entrepreneurs and many other health partners to prepare for the launch of the war room.

The war room will become a memorial to Donald Makhubele and all the countless others who have died of disease in Africa. It is also another example whereby entrepreneurial skills coupled with health expertise and knowledge from the front lines will together build a powerful force for change.

One day in April 2006, I received a copy of the starfish parable – from Starfish, a charity that focuses on the Aids orphan crisis in South Africa.

A girl walks along a beach, throwing starfish back into the sea, when she meets an old man. The man asks the girl why she is throwing starfish into the ocean. She says: 'The sun is up and the tide is going out, if I don't throw them back they will all die.' The old man says, 'But there's a whole beach and it runs on for miles. You can't possibly make a difference.' The girl picks up a starfish and throws it back in the sea. 'It made a difference to that one.'

What can you do to make a difference? And why should you do it?

If the account of some of our work in Africa has leapt rather dizzyingly from small-scale innovations to big-policy manoeuvres and back again, it did so for the very good reason that the scale of one's social investments doesn't matter.

What matters is that you operate as a force for good at every scale available to you. An Aids policy rolled out across the staff of your business is as important as an Aids policy rolled out across the entire Virgin Group, or across an entire nation. The important thing is to have the idea, and realise it, however modestly.

This includes looking at your future investment strategy to try to find business opportunities that will also help tackle tough issues.

Over the last five years Virgin Unite has grown into a platform to help all of us across the Virgin Group drive change. It brings everyone together with a common focus to try to do our best for people and the planet. Virgin Unite is making sure that it's not just me trying to do my bit, but instead the whole Virgin community works to do whatever we can – small or large – to make a difference.

These differences come in all shapes, depending on the business. With Virgin Atlantic, in their quest to become the most sustainable airline possible, they are looking at various aspects of the operation to see how they can reduce their impact on the environment. One thing I'm particularly excited about is the biofuels test they successfully completed a few months ago. Finding an alternative environmentally friendly fuel source will be one of the biggest contributions we could ever make as an airline.

Dan Schulman and his team at Virgin Mobile USA have worked with Virgin Unite, their staff, customers and young people in the US to come up with ways they can use their core assets to make a difference for the 1.5 million homeless teenagers in the US. It's still shocking that in such wealthy countries we are allowing teenagers to live on the streets. Virgin Mobile have used their text messaging communication channels, website, lobbying voices and anything else they can find to help build awareness of the issue and to raise money. They teamed up with singer/songwriter Jewel and Virgin Unite to lobby the US government who have now made November 'Teen Homeless Month'. This has been a great initiative not only for our partners, such as Stand Up for Kids, and the young people they serve, but also for the business. It has truly built a community among our customers, staff and homeless teenagers, who have come together to drive change and learn from one another.

Sometimes the businesses focus on their own programmes and other times they come together as a group to make greater impact. For example, one initiative we recently launched is finding and supporting the best grassroots ideas that have environmental benefits and also help to create local jobs, from employing Aboriginal people in Australia to practise their ancient land-burning techniques which minimise carbon output and protect biodiversity, to working in Kenya on an ecolodge that will help the Green Belt Movement sustain their reforesting projects. We hope that these smaller projects will scale up over the coming years, using the fight against climate change and the need to protect our natural resources as an opportunity also to fight poverty in the world.

Good small solutions are like gold dust as it's often possible to scale them up, or replicate them manyfold, so that they acquire global influence. Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank is a classic example.

So don't let relative scale put you off your goals. Think realistically and creatively about what you can achieve. You can do this whether you're a corporate manager or a sole trader – and what you learn by way of entrepreneurship will directly benefit you in your business.

If there is one line that could sum up all the varied and curious lessons I've learned in business, it's this: scale doesn't matter – people do. This thinking is reflected in some of my current work: creating small entrepreneurial 'war rooms' to tackle big issues. So let me show you, finally, how I'm working with Virgin Unite and other partners to set up a war room to help deal with the biggest, most elusive, most pressing and most abstract problem of all: climate change.

Reading comic books, when I was growing up, one of my recurring nightmares was the invasion of aliens from Mars. It was terrifying stuff: everywhere I looked, bug-eyed monsters were zapping humans with their ray guns. The sci-fi films of the 1950s such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and The War of the Worlds regularly showed our planet under attack. It was a horrifying prospect. The solution was invariably that all the world's nations had to bury their differences and get together to ward off a common enemy.

The equivalent of that alien invasion is already here. It's impossible to see, it's odourless, and it's everywhere. Our war is against carbon. Not an alien menace, after all, but – irony of ironies – one of the building blocks of life.

On the Celsius scale, zero is the freezing point and 100 degrees the boiling point of water. For the last 10,000 years, the average surface temperature of the Earth has been around 14°C. The hottest recorded temperature has been 58°C at El Azizia in the Sahara Desert in 1922. The year 2007 was the warmest on record.

But if the average surface temperature rises by 5°C – and scientists now say it will unless we wean ourselves off this business of burning fuels that release CO2 into the atmosphere – then our planet becomes a hostile and arid place. We are now at 14.5°C – moving to 19°C will be disastrous. So we must act now.

Earlier this year, I was clearing out some possessions of the previous owner on Mosquito Island, which is being developed as a low-carbon ecotourist destination in the Caribbean, and stumbled on some old picture books written by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Cousteau, who invented the aqualung, warned about the destruction of the sea. In the 1970s, he filmed a polluted section of the Mediterranean devoid of life, and these shocking images led to immediate environmental action.

In his first book, Window in the Sea, published in 1973, Cousteau posed the question: What happens if our oceans die?

If the oceans of the Earth should die – that is, if life in the oceans were suddenly, somehow to come to an end – it would be the final as well as the greatest catastrophe in the troublous story of men and the other animals and plants with whom man shares this planet.

With no life in the seas the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere would set forth on an inexorable climb. When this CO₂ level passed a certain point the 'greenhouse effect' would come into operation: heat radiating outwards from Earth to space would be trapped beneath the stratosphere, shooting up sea-level temperatures. At both North and South Poles the icecaps would melt and oceans would rise perhaps 100 feet in a small number of years.

The calamity we are facing is not unknown, not unforeseen, not even surprising. Cousteau wrote his prophetic warning thirty-five years ago.

Every business around the world must now radically change its thinking. In every aspect of its operation, it must do much more to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide it releases into the air. And this won't be easy, since the endeavours of humans in agriculture and business, responding to the demands of consumers and customers, have been partly responsible for creating the problem in the first place.

As mentioned, all of our businesses are looking at how they can reinvent the way they operate to try to minimise the impact they have on the environment. This issue has personally captured my imagination and set me off on a journey to discover new approaches.

First, I had to muster the facts. Then I could look at the marketplace, and come up with a scheme. But I also needed an expert sounding board – which I found in both Professor James Lovelock, a man who is the environmental equivalent of Nelson Mandela, and Tim Flannery, an ecologist whose book The Weather Makers is the best guide to our current situation that I have read.

Scientists have been able to drill a deep hole into the Antarctic ice caps to collect core samples which they have examined. The ice samples contain air bubbles. From the amount of carbon dioxide in the air trapped inside these icy time capsules, they can tell how temperatures have risen over the years. The invention of the steam engine and the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in the 1780s in Britain began this cycle of the age-old process. But even more influential were the medical and social advances that gifted us clean water, sanitation, a better diet and inoculations against common diseases. Suddenly, there were more of us. The population of the world exploded, and continues to explode, and virtually everyone on the planet is consuming many times more energy than their parents ever did and we are now in 'deficit financing' of the planet – the ecological equivalent of sub-prime lending.

Before 1800 there were about 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Since then industry has burnt, smelted and forged, and humans have farmed, cooked and heated themselves with huge quantities of carbon. Still, for generations, there was equilibrium as vegetation used atmospheric carbon dioxide to grow. But now we are overdrawn in the carbon bank and heading towards a Northern Rock or Bear Stearns situation very soon.

The economic prosperity of the modern world has been built on two deadly but energy-rich hydrocarbons: coal and oil. Over many millennia, most of Earth's carbon has been locked away in the ground.

Dead plants and animals, buried in the ground and compressed, became fossil fuels. If human activity were to extract all of this carbon from the ground and burn it, the carbon released would combine with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, and then we wouldn't have to worry about global warming any more: we'd already be dead from asphyxiation. There wouldn't be enough oxygen left for us to breathe.

In July 2005, the Stern Review on climate change was announced by Gordon Brown, then the UK's Chancellor of Exchequer. Sir Nicholas Stern, who was former chief economist at the World Bank, wanted to assess the economic benefits of moving to a low-carbon economy, and the potential for adapting to climate change. The review was published in October 2006 and I found it an impressive addition to the debate. He reported that the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases were already up from 280ppm during the Industrial Revolution to 430ppm. This is set to rise to 550ppm by 2035, bringing at least a 77 per cent chance that the average global temperature will increase by more than two degrees. A rise of two degrees is the maximum that scientists believe we can tolerate, before our current climate suffers a runaway collapse.

Most alarming was Stern's warning that with no action on emissions, the world's temperature could go up by more than five degrees by the end of the twenty-first century. This kind of rise would send human life on Earth into unknown territory. He pointed out that even a three- or four-degree rise would cause a serious decline in crop yields, and sea level rises that would threaten London, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Cairo. It would also mean the collapse of the Amazon rainforest and the possible shutting down of the Gulf Stream – the ocean current delivering temperate climates to much of Europe.

Stern calculated that the overall costs and risks of climate change would be the equivalent of losing at least 5 per cent of global GDP. But if a wider range of risks was taken into account, such as the spread of disease, then this could rise to 20 per cent or more. On purely technical grounds, this is a risk to business that now has to be taken seriously – and factored into every part of commercial thinking.

In order to stabilise atmospheric gases at around 500 to 550ppm, global emissions at 2006 levels would have to be reduced by 80 per cent. The challenge is that emissions must peak, then fall by 1 to 3 per cent a year for the foreseeable future. Among Stern's proposals there were four sets of measures that were of particular interest to the Virgin Group: reducing demand for goods and services that produced a great deal of emissions; an increased efficiency in any engines when we did use carbon; swifter action on non-energy emissions, such as the burning and clearing of tropical forest land; and switching to low-carbon technologies for power, heat and transport.

Some global businesses are making an effort to tackle the issue, but piecemeal efforts are not going to be enough. Our war against carbon dioxide needs to be expanded by government and by business into every product, every application and every design. We also need to do something to extract as much existing carbon dioxide as possible from the atmosphere. That was the challenge that drew my immediate attention.

Steve Howard, the CEO of the Climate Change Group, believes we have a few years to make a massive global difference – or human life as we know it could cease to exist within a couple of hundred. I am an optimist and I believe that business can – and will – find the solutions to this massive problem. But for our children's sake, we have to embrace this challenge, every day, from now on.

Perhaps I took nature too much for granted. I was brought up in stunning English countryside, surrounded by wildlife, birds and trees. A love of the natural environment has been a big part of my life. But it was a visit to my London home by a former US presidential candidate that was the tipping point for my view of how that love should inform the way businesses are run.

The former US vice president, Al Gore, came to visit me in Holland Park. I had never met him before. He asked to see me because he was looking for a business leader who was recognised on a global basis. It seemed that I fitted the bill. He thought I could make a gesture that might bring other business leaders along too. He spent two hours giving me, Will Whitehorn and Jean Oelwang a guided tour of the issues surrounding climate change – a presentation that was later to reach many millions as his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Prior to Al Gore's visit, I had read a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist, which was dangerously convenient reading for someone in business! It argued that global warming could even be a positive thing that would stop the world heading for the next ice age. But as a result of meeting Al Gore, I went back to other scientists and other thinkers. I rediscovered the work of Crispin Tickell and James Lovelock. And by the end of my reading, I had reached an inconvenient truth of my own: that I had to do something rather than be passive.

Finally I was handed a book that stopped me in my tracks. It was Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. Tim's thesis was fascinating – and alarming. It put flesh on the bones of the concept of global warming. It gave concrete examples of what was happening and why. I devoured its many beautifully written stories. One in particular sticks in my mind: how the American pioneers cut and burnt the great eastern forests and burnt and grazed the western plains and deserts. Eventually, the vegetation grew back – which is why most of America's forests are less than sixty years old and regrowing vigorously in the process, absorbing half a billion tonnes of CO₂ a year. This has helped cool the planet. Once this vegetation matures, however, it will stop extracting as much CO₂, just when we need its assistance most.

Tim's book was a gem, and I noticed that he returned again and again to the work of James Lovelock. Tim was greatly influenced by Lovelock's book Gaia, which talked persuasively about the Earth as a single, living entity.

I had to meet James Lovelock and find out what he thought. One of the privileges of my life is that I get to meet many brilliant people. Jim is an independent thinker, inventor and scientist. In his late eighties, he is sharp and lucid. An honorary professor at Oxford University, he has won many medals and accolades for his original environmental thinking.

As a young mathematician and scientist, James Lovelock regularly visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena. The laboratory was closely connected with NASA and the American space programme, and undertook work for unmanned space missions. Jim's inventions have gone into several of the interplanetary probes NASA has launched over the years to explore other planets. Jim also worked on a remote-controlled microbiological laboratory, which was to be dispatched in a rocket to Mars to test whether the planet could sustain bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms. It was then that Jim began to pose the basic question: What is life – and how can we recognise it?

Working with his acclaimed colleague Dian Hitchcock, he began to study the potential for life on Mars. And as they worked, the scientists naturally turned back, for comparison, to Earth – its biosphere and atmosphere. They came to the conclusion that the only feasible explanation of our planet's atmosphere was that it was being manipulated on a daily basis from the surface. The constant flux of all the different gases in the Earth's atmosphere was itself proof of living activity.

Jim's emerging theory was that the world and its atmosphere were one living and breathing system. It was a radical view for its time and rejected by the scientific consensus. However, Carl Sagan, the editor of the astronomy journal Icarus, was intrigued enough to publish Jim's views.

When, in 1965, the US government abandoned the Martian exploration project that Jim had been working on, he went to work for Shell Research, to consider the effects of air pollution and its global consequences. This was in 1966, and three years before the foundation of Friends of the Earth. Jim warned about the build-up of particles which were then depleting the ozone layer – a thin skin of gas which protects us from the sun's radiation. One of his many inventions was the electron capture device which was essential for detecting and measuring the atmospheric concentration of chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) – the chemicals responsible for breaking down the ozone layer.

It was his friend, the writer William Golding, author of the Lord of the Flies, who gave him the name. Golding suggested 'Gaia' after the Greek goddess of the Earth. (It's from her that we get the root of words like geography and geology.) Jim put forward his 'Gaia hypothesis' at a scientific meeting about the origins of life on Earth at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1968. Gaia is Jim's shorthand for the complex interactions between the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soils. Earth, in his view, is effectively a self-regulating mechanism – a machine for life.

When I first spoke to Jim he told me that in the 1970s, he had no clear idea how that machine worked, but as a scientist he knew that the Earth was different from our nearest neighbours in our solar system, and he was fascinated by how the Earth, unlike Mars and Venus, constantly managed to make itself a fit and healthy place to live.

Jim Lovelock has become a great friend, and he has shared with me his work on his long-overdue follow-up book – a soliloquy for his beloved Gaia. Even in his advancing years, his freedom of thought and mind is astounding. I'm not an academic and I struggle with some of the detailed scientific technical stuff, but Jim's descriptions are poignant, beautiful and understandable.

Jim knows he isn't going to live for ever, and that his ideas will disappear unless we capture them now. So he has been sending me a host of ideas in the hope that I can turn at least some of them into businesses. He talks about dropping pipes into the ocean, about burying algae at sea, about putting extra sulphur into the atmosphere. He is not a crank, or a lone voice in the wilderness. He is an internationally celebrated and revered figure and his ideas have a lot of currency. What is lacking, however, is the sort of serious, heavily funded research necessary to show which of his ideas are most worth pursuing.

In April 2006, almost in the same post as the letter from the charity Starfish, I found a letter from former US president Bill Clinton, inviting me to the Clinton Global Initiative, to be held in New York that September. I fully respect the work that Bill is doing to tackle social and environmental issues, so a few days later I agreed to participate. Bill also phoned me and asked if there was any gesture that I would be willing to make.

I was sitting in the bath when it occurred to me: why not just divert all the profits made by the Virgin Group from our carbon-creating businesses – such as the airlines and trains – and invest it in developing the cleaner technologies of the future? I'd also look at business research on wind power and solar power and anything that could replace the fossil fuels. When I briefed him beforehand, Bill was excited. He wanted to make it the centrepiece of the meeting in September. I said I would like Al Gore, Bill's former vice president, to be there as well. I said that without Al visiting me I wouldn't have come up with the idea in the first place. Bill Clinton's introduction went like this:

'I've had the privilege in my increasingly long life to know a lot of amazing people and Richard Branson is one of the most interesting, creative, genuinely committed people I have ever known.'

I gulped with embarrassment when I heard about this. Thanks, Bill – but then you expected me to speak?

Happily for me, I wasn't in the hall. An aide shouted up to him: 'He's not here yet. He's on his way.' As ever, I had missed my cue. I was in the loo.

Bill coolly segued into the next item. Well, I made it – eventually. And I outlined my plans for the Virgin Group. 'What we've decided to do is to put any proceeds received by the Virgin Group from our transportation businesses into tackling environmental issues, and hopefully it will be something like $3 billion over a number of years . . . Like Al Gore, I don't believe it is too late. I think we do have a handful, two handfuls of years to get the ball rolling, to address the problem. And if we can develop alternative fuels, if people can take risks on developing enzymes, if we can try to get cellulose ethanol, then replace the dirty fuels that we're using at the moment, then I think we've got a great future.'

Al stepped up. 'Richard,' he said, 'I have one question. I didn't hear it on the list, and I want to make sure. Are the expected profits from the rocket ships also going into this?' I nodded and said: 'By the way, they are environmentally friendly rocket ships!'

The conference was well received, and my announcement did what Al Gore wanted. That a business leader in the transport industry admitted there were problems with global warming and that something had to be done about it made the headlines. And this would make it more difficult for the oil and coal companies to continue to deny their responsibilities. But I decided I needed to help make a further step – and this time, a prize made the best sense. We set up a prize to encourage every inventive thinker to try to come up with a way of extracting carbon dioxide out of the Earth's atmosphere. If that could be achieved, the temperature of our planet could be regulated by mankind, extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when it gets too hot.

On 9 February 2007, we announced the Virgin Earth Challenge. To win the $25 million prize, participants will have to demonstrate a provable, commercially viable design which will result in the removal or displacement of a significant amount of environmental greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The challenge will run for ten years.

Al Gore agreed to be a judge; so too did Tim Flannery and James Lovelock. I also asked two other distinguished people to join the panel – Sir Crispin Tickell, the director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation at Oxford University, and Dr James Hansen, professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute and head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. This was a heavyweight group of assessors.

The judges will decide whether a scheme has the potential to make a significant difference to global warming, and whether the prize should be awarded to one winner or shared between two or three. We found that setting more prescriptive targets was pointless, because there are so many ways to address the greenhouse gas problem. This point was very well put by James Lovelock, who was as sharp as ever when commenting on our early suggestions:

I was surprised to read in the outline of the Virgin Earth Challenge that the requirement for the prizewinner was the removal of at least one billion tonnes of CO₂ per year. This seems small compared with the near 30 billion tonnes we add yearly. In fact, 6.3 billion humans breathe out yearly nearly two billion tonnes of CO₂ – trying to restore the Earth by removing one or even two billion tonnes a year is a bit like trying to bail out a leaky rowing boat with a teaspoon . . .

He said we should keep in mind that a billion tonnes of carbon could be taken out of the atmosphere if we synthesised our food, which would release huge areas of farmland to revert to natural vegetation.

Is it too late to make the conditions harder and at the same time more general? It would be a shame to have to turn down a good proposal for a method for making tasty and nutritious food by biochemical synthesis directly from air and water.

I knew I had to get Jim more involved, and Will Whitehorn offered to go and see him. Returning from a climate change meeting in France with former president Jacques Chirac, he agreed to complete the line-up of judges for the prize. 'It's a grand idea,' he wrote, 'and who knows, it might just promote the discovery of an answer. We have all spent far too long sleepwalking towards extinction and need an incentive.'

I think that all business people need to have sceptical scientific friends who can challenge, prod and stimulate. Jim was certainly doing this for me.

A successful application for the Virgin Earth Challenge could very well take into account the Earth's self-regulating ability. In September 2007, Jim and his colleague Chris Rapley wrote to the science journal Nature: 'The removal of 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the air by human endeavour is beyond our current technological capability. If we can't "heal the planet" directly, we may be able to help the planet heal itself.'

One way to do this would be to lower vertical pipes into the ocean. Wave power could enable a simple pump to drive cold, nutrient-rich waters up from the depths to the relatively barren ocean surface. This would promote the growth of algae, which would consume CO2 and produce dimethyl sulphide, the chemical that turns humid air into clouds.

Jim mentioned this example to me because he was attending a meeting in Washington the following week and wanted to discuss the idea with scientists and engineers there. He recently wrote to me with a new idea:

More and more I think our best chance of reversing global heating lies in the burial of charcoal on land and in the ocean. If most farm waste were turned into charcoal yearly on the farms and then ploughed in, this alone would do much more than anything otherwise proposed. More than this, the preparation of charcoal yields a modest amount of biofuel and the total could be quite large. It would take longer to establish the same scheme with ocean farms but if we really intend to do something this is the way to go.

It's an ingenious notion – and might even become a successful business proposition.

Within the first year, the Virgin Earth Challenge attracted more than 3,000 notes of interest – and this was very exciting. But one thing began to dawn on me: prizes do take time to produce results. Peter Diamandis came up with the X Prize concept for commercial space flight in 1994 and over the course of several years had presented it to numerous people for funding – including Virgin – but it wasn't won by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen until ten years later. As fighters in the war against global warming, we were all too well aware that time was one thing in very short supply.

A prize of $25 million was an incentive for departments at a lot of universities – but I began to ask what if there was a bounty ten or even twenty times this size? Perhaps this would attract the major industries to divert significant research and development into the project. A prize of this magnitude would do a great deal to stimulate the large corporates with their massive R&D spending power.

With this in mind, early in 2008, I accepted an invitation to address the UN's two-day workshop on climate change, where I was made UN Citizen of the Year by the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for my work on climate change. As the owner of several airlines, even I can see the irony in that!

I already had a lot of sympathy for the views of Jeffrey Sachs, outlined in his book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, when he stated: 'When it comes to problem-solving on a global scale, we remain weighed down by cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions. A world of untrammelled market forces and competing nation states offers no automatic solutions to these challenges. The key will lie in developing new sustainable technologies and ensuring that they rapidly reach all those who need them.'

So I arrived in New York with Jackie McQuillan and Jean Oelwang, determined to make a public plea for the creation of an Environmental War Room. I intended opening with a Cousteau quotation: 'There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Russia, no China, no Taiwan. Rivers flow unimpeded across the swathes of continents. The persistent tides, the pulse of the sea do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth.'

The president of the UN General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs for Macedonia, chaired the session. As I remember it, this went under the banner 'Addressing Climate Change: The United Nations and the World at Work'. Srgjan was a gracious host. Among the other participants were the Secretary-General and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. Also with me at the conference was the actress Daryl Hannah, a perceptive campaigner on climate change issues.

On 11 February, Srgjan introduced the session: 'I am very much encouraged in that the climate is changing – in terms of the political climate at least – and that people have replaced ignorance with awareness. Awareness is now our ally but that's not enough. We are not talking about long-term planning and the world of tomorrow. We're talking about the emergencies of today.'

He explained that the United Nations was talking about partnerships and that a negotiation process was going on among member nations on setting up targets on greenhouse gases. But he said that only partnerships that included the business world, the media, the non-governmental organisations, and academics (such as those who made a contribution with the IPCC, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and helped politicians understand the magnitude of the problem) would work. He stressed that the UN could not do it all by itself. The chairman said that when he was preparing for his role as president of the General Assembly he had read about climate change – and he acknowledged the creation of the Virgin Earth Challenge. 'It is not by chance that they are here; they inspired me,' he said. 'I invited them . . . this is why we are here together.'

I started in a sombre tone. At the last minute I dispensed with the poetic Cousteau intro and went straight for the jugular. 'There are some eminent scientists who already believe that we have gone through the tipping point, that there is nothing mankind can now do to stop the Earth heating up by five degrees, with all the dire consequences that will come with that.'

I then cited Jim Lovelock, saying that he went further than the UN report and he predicted we would lose all the floating ice in the summer months in the Arctic Ocean within ten years and that the five-degree rise is likely within forty years, rather than the eighty years that had been predicted by the United Nations. However, unlike the UN report, he believes that the world will then stabilise at this five-degree rise and that there will be survivors. But much of the lush, comfortable world that we now enjoy will be gone. It will erode into a largely featureless desert. The loss of life is likely to be gigantic, and we will be in a world where not nearly enough food is grown, or enough fresh water is available, to support a large population.

'Whether you believe we have gone through the tipping point or not, most scientists are in agreement that we are extremely close to it and it doesn't look particularly good. History has taught us that in times of peril, when all seems lost, bringing together the minds of the greatest to work together with one common goal – survival – is the most effective way to prevail. I'm convinced a winning strategy can be devised. The great minds are out there – but they are fighting in isolation.

'We all need to play a role to bring all the scientists, engineers and inventors worldwide together to come up with innovative, radical approaches to the issue, including finding a way to extract carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. If such a breakthrough could be made, mankind would be able to regulate the Earth's temperature. By extracting carbon when it's getting too hot – and by adding carbon when it's too cold. We have certainly sorted how to add carbon – we just need to sort out how to extract it. But it cannot be beyond the wit of man to crack this problem.'

Then I made a strong offer of partnership to anyone out there really concerned about this. 'Virgin has put up a $25 million prize to encourage scientists and inventors to put their mind to it. Today we'd like to urge the twenty wealthiest governments to match us in this endeavour so we can make this the largest scientific prize in history – a half-a-billion-dollar prize.' Surely, this would get some traction! I'm still waiting for a call.

I feel that with enough determination the world can pull together to fight this common enemy. I believe that man's ingenuity – driven in many cases by business acumen – can get on top of these catastrophic issues. And so I have begun to think of the way dark times focus great minds to a common goal. This is exactly what we need now: everyone has to work together and find the best solution. When Britain was faced with the prospect of war in Europe in the late 1930s, the Royal Air Force's Operational Requirements Branch determined the specification for a monoplane design to take on the Nazis. They had two projects competing against each other. Reginald Mitchell's Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane, designed by Camm, had to be able to hit an all-metal bomber 266 times to lethally damage it. The designers had to meet this challenge by firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Both succeeded. There are countless examples of new technologies emerging to overcome the odds in wartime – from the invention of cannons powerful enough to bombard castle walls, to the birth of modern computing among the Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park in England, a team led by Alan Turing. So why not create a peacetime war room to fight the new common enemy – runaway climate change?

The Environmental War Room will be a unique combination of entrepreneurial muscle, the best possible data and the power to mobilise resources and inspire innovation. Representatives from big business and finance will work alongside representatives from 'green' organisations with whom they may previously have been at odds. It will be a collection of 'best of class' thinking, brought together for the good of all – and it will be truly global. The plan is to have a small, indepedent team that works closely with partners to ensure we don't duplicate, but instead connect the dots on what is already happening, provide reliable information and help speed up the solutions.

The war room will identify all the best (and in some cases radical) ideas, map who is doing what, track and prioritise the impact of existing solutions on carbon reduction and the conservation of ecological systems. It will provide analyses of all the data collected, and identify and prioritise the best options.

Leadership is paramount here. During the questions and answers at the UN conference, the journalists were intrigued to find out who would lead our troops into battle – and I was asked several times about Al Gore. I deflected the questions because we were still considering who we should appoint – I acknowledged he would be a great person to lead us in such a battle, but I wasn't sure how he might take it. We need a Winston Churchill or a Franklin D. Roosevelt figure – someone with the respect, stature and voice to assert their authority.

So just as Virgin Unite is now in the process of setting up a war room to tackle disease in sub-Saharan Africa, they are also in the process of creating a war room to tackle carbon.

Should we fail to find a technological solution then we must start to prepare the world for the consequences of a five-degree rise in temperature and look at ways of mitigating the worst effects. The war room must find radical ideas and win the global community's backing, as happened when CFC gases were banned worldwide to deal with the hole in the ozone layer.

At the session in New York, I introduced one idea as an example. 'It is now widely accepted that rising sea levels, as a result of global warming, will destroy hundreds of thousands of homes in coastal towns all over the world and displace millions of the world's population. But what if today we start planning to create massive inland lakes in Africa, Asia, Australia, North Canada and South America, using fresh water from rivers that would otherwise have gone into the sea? These inland seas can be created as sea levels start to rise with the aim of keeping sea levels as they are at present. They will also – as water – have an added benefit in helping to cool the Earth down. They will help create more rain in desert regions, which in turn will create more trees – which in turn will absorb more carbon.'

The Environmental War Room would be able to place a cost on such large ideas, negotiating compensation 'costs' with individual countries. But I stressed that the United Nations would need to work in partnership with the war room to ensure implementation happens. I had prepared a quote from Sir Winston Churchill, who created his famous War Room in London, during the Second World War. 'One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!'

In March 2008, at the suggestion of Richard Stromback, a former professional hockey player who struck gold as a clean-technology entrepreneur, we decided to have a small gathering of people who were addressing the issue to see how we might be able to join forces. Richard, the chief executive of Ecology Coatings, the Climate Group and Virgin Unite invited a group of like-minded business people and former political figures to the event to consider further opportunities. Larry Page, from Google, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal, Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, and Tony Blair – the former British prime minister, now working as a Middle East peace envoy – were among those attending.

In America, the 'clean tech' business boom has already begun, not only in Silicon Valley and the rest of California, but also in and around Boston, around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and near Austin, Texas. Already energy investments are the third largest component of all US venture capital funds, and by far the fastest growing segment. The number of companies and individuals to watch in this sector is now large, with companies like Odersun, Solyndra, Clipper Windpower and Enphase Energy moving very fast.

Shai Agassi, the former president of SAP's product and technology group, is out on his own now as the founder of Better Place of Palo Alto; he has been trying to create the infrastructure to operate a countrywide fleet of electric vehicles in Israel.

Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal and now a space entrepreneur, talked about his Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes electric sports cars retailing for $100,000. (Larry has ordered one, but I'm holding off for the moment as I rarely even use a car now.) Hunt Ramsbottom, chief executive of the synthetic fuel technology company Rentech, talked about his plans to make biofuels for aeroplanes, while William McDonough showed us designs for a building in Abu Dhabi with solar panels built into the windows, and a Wal-Mart distribution centre with an energy-friendly grass roof.

Then Tony Blair said something that chimed with me – and made me more determined than ever to pursue the war room. He said governments are too busy firefighting to truly make a difference. 'It is frightening with the day-to-day hustle and bustle of government how little time is spent on the major issues such as carbon,' he told us. For example, the UK's environment minister would come in for a meeting with him for perhaps two hours a month if he was lucky. The Cabinet would work out some short-term project and say: 'OK, let's do this or that.'

If this is typical, then there is a truly desperate need for the Environmental War Room – and I see the green entrepreneurial community playing a central role in its operations.

To run a business ethically, you have to consider the effect of your operations on others. You would never tolerate bribery; by the same token, you must not tolerate casual damage to the environment.

It took me a while to realise this. I was half afraid to look the problem of climate change in the eye. It daunted me. I thought it was too big for me – too big for anyone. And so I tried to persuade myself that it didn't exist.

Like one that, on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

But unlike the outlook of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, business is about facing up to realities. Real problems – even ones as gigantic as climate change – are never as frightening as the spectres in our minds. We can do something about global warming. We just have to lose our fear of it. We have been frozen in horror and denial for too long. We have to act.

No one is asking you to save the planet. Just dream up and work on a couple of good ideas. No one expects you to find a global solution to everything. Just make a difference where you can. Local solutions have a value in themselves, and some can be scaled up, so it doesn't matter how modest your budget, you can and will make a difference.

That's the good news.

Now comes the frightening bit.

If you don't do this, then you will almost certainly go out of business, if not next year, then in five years' time, or ten or twenty. The climate is changing and the population is rocketing. As a consequence the price of everything is fluctuating. The insurance market is in chaos. Unpredictable, unexpected shortages are disturbing production. Changing weather patterns are imperilling whole populations and disrupting the economies of entire nations. And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

You'll recall that when I was describing our development of biofuels and spacecraft, I said that there was no such thing as an overnight success in a new market: that Virgin's early emergence in these sectors was the consequence of years of reading and research.

The sector we might as well call 'responses to climate change' is not a sector we can choose whether or not to do business in. It's a sector that now embraces all of us, whether we like it or not. Big or small, we have to do business in this area because our failure to do so will ruin us.

If you're not ahead of the game, if you're not researching the solutions to problems that may affect your business a decade from now, then you run the serious risk that you will haemorrhage and fail.

But why look at this through the gloomy end of the telescope? The reverse is equally true: make a success of yourself in this sector, and you will find yourself turning something that advantages everyone into a handsome profit for your company.

With that profit, you can then dream up and experiment with bigger and bigger scale solutions. Addressing climate change is good business; and I guarantee that once you bite the bullet and start work in this sector, you won't want to stop.

HIV/Aids and climate change are issues that I have a personal passion for and that make sense for the Virgin Group to get behind. We are working on other social and environmental investments, but the one thing all of our efforts in this area have in common is that they leverage Virgin's biggest asset – the entrepreneurial spirit of our people. This spirit, coupled with the right partners and great ideas, can truly help us make a difference, help communities thrive and help our planet.

If we want a world that we can be proud to leave to the next seven generations, every business needs to look at how they can drive change in every aspect of their operations. One last point: don't forget to listen – as some of the best ideas will come from your staff, customers and people on the front lines!

If you ever fancy joining us as a partner in any of our endeavours to make the world a better place, please contact us at Virgin Unite: www.virginunite.com.