MOST of us have never heard of Nauru unless we watch the BBC 1 programme Pointless, where it often scores very low points as the smallest independent country in the world, with fewer than 10,000 people.

It’s an eight square mile coral island, north east from Australia, 50 miles south of the equator.

It sounds idyllic, and so it might once have been, but recent human behaviour has made it a poster case for the way we are abusing the planet.

The last 150 years have been exceptionally greedy and it started in the nineteenth century with German colonial status which ended in 1914.

Australia and the UK then took over until it was occupied by the Japanese in 1940, and finally it became independent in 1968.

It began as a low coral island, but sea bird droppings built up over thousands of years to produce a phosphate, nitrogen and potassium rich natural fertiliser, guano, rock-like, forming an interior plateau around 200 feet high.

However, 80 per cent of this resource was strip mined between 1900 and 1970 leaving the only habitable land, and healthy vegetation, as a fringe around the coast. Now all water, food and fuel must be imported.

Nauru is almost a metaphor for the way that we live for the present and ignore the future.

When the guano deposits were exhausted Nauru considered a route taken by many other small island communities and became an offshore tax haven for 400 unregulated banks and a centre for illegal money laundering.

This has now stopped and they currently depend almost completely on a disturbing contract with the Australian government. Nauru receives funding to accept an Asylum Immigration Detention Centre, away from Australian soil, managed by a private company.

In May this year there were 1,100 detainees, including 190 children, living in locked, fenced compounds, some under canvas, in temperatures often over 45 degrees.

The lack of basic facilities, and the indifference to individual needs, has sparked riots and self harm in the recent past, and the problems will become increasingly more challenging in the future.There will be millions more people displaced from their homes before 2100.

Tucking them away on Pacific islands won’t work, so we need to start reducing CO2 emissions now by taking the threat seriously, and accepting we need to work together.