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ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » Tees Valley and Greece may lie about 1,500 miles apart but tales of their economic suffering are eerily similar.
Both have been caught up in a much wider problem that will be hard for them to escape.
Tees Valley is inextricably bound up in a country that has a red-warning budget deficit of around 12%.
This is going to mean acute pain in the form of higher taxes and deep public spending cuts that could end up parking much-needed infrastructure improvements in Tees Valley.
Government incompetence, over-leveraging, public sector inefficiencies and private sector greed have all exacerbated a problem which has been replicated in Athens.
Greece also has a budget deficit of around 12%, a below average savings rate and an unemployment rate mirroring the North-east of England's at almost one in ten.
Amid public outrage at swingeing job cuts and pay freezes, it will not be easy for Athens to carry out its promise to slash the deficit to 3% by 2013.
The problem for Greece is that it is part of the Euro which means, unlike Britain, it cannot devalue its currency to kick-start economic growth.
Sterling has dropped by more than 20% against the euro and the dollar, making it cheaper for Tees Valley exporters to sell their goods abroad (although the cost-savings have been partially offset by higher import charges).
Greece does not have its own currency and therefore cannot manipulate it. But its woes can certainly influence the Euro's value, perhaps even killing it for good.
In the absence of concrete financial help from Euro powerhouses France and Germany, there are real fears that Greece will default on debts due to mature this year.
And if the problem spreads to other vulnerable Euro members - Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy are also suffering varying degrees of sickness - the break-up of the Euro-zone and end of the single currency are real possibilities.
Even if a bail-out eventually comes, it won't solve the underlying debt problem in a country that generates only one seventh of the output generated by Britain.
Teesside exporters into Europe will want to maintain the single currency - and so should the rest of us.
Failure to contain Greece's problems could spark a global sovereign debt crisis and a second wave of recession.
Having used all the levers at its disposal - savage interest rate cuts, tax holidays and quantitative easing - policymakers would have no more weapons to fight what could become the first global depression of the twenty-first century.
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