HSBC Holdings plc is headquartered in the UK. The HSBC Group serves over 110 million customers worldwide from approximately 10,000 offices in 76 countries and territories in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa. With assets of US$1,154 billion at 30 June 2004, HSBC is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organisations. HSBC is marketed worldwide as ‘the world’s local bank’.

Swiss Re is one of the world’s leading reinsurers and the world’s largest life and health reinsurer. The company operates through more than 70 offices in over 30 countries. Swiss Re has been in the reinsurance business since its foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1863. Through its three business groups Property & Casualty, Life & Health and Financial Services, Swiss Re offers a wide variety of products to manage capital and risk.

Climate change continues to have an ever-greater effect on our everyday lives, as the inspiring and unsettling images in this book record. To address the challenge of climate change, we need a global effort: a global shift in the way we produce and use energy, a shift to a low carbon economy. The UK is helping to lead the way in showing what action can be taken at a domestic level. Our Energy White Paper, published in 2003, puts these activities into a long-term perspective. The White Paper reaffirms our goal to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by 2010 and has a longer term goal to put the UK on a path to reduce emissions of CO2 by around 60% by 2050.