We must change to battle climate change

I realise that governments are never going to be the ones to do something in time, they are far too cosy in bed with the fossil-fuel industries. Ultimately, fast, direct action will have to come from us and require us to change our lifestyles.

If you are reading this in the comfort of your own home or perhaps on your summer holiday, it’s very easy to pretend to ourselves that catastrophic climate change is not really happening — it’s almost impossible to imagine, although last summer was a chilling prologue.

However, if you look outside our relatively sheltered, albeit burnt, shores, life already isn’t easy for so many people. Comfort has only been the norm for a small percentage of us for a small amount of time.

Coronavirus has shown us that we can all work together to radically and quickly change our lifestyles for the greater good. We need to consider how we can prepare for a world that will be faced with regular extreme weather, unpredictable water and power supplies, food shortages and the resulting unrest that will come with these.

We need to sit with the grief and fear and then work through it starting, well, yesterday.

Create community, build skill bases, buy water tanks and solar panels with batteries, grow a garden, future-proof your house if you have one, demand more action from governments and encourage others with compassion and determination.

Basically, we need to be good ancestors … and the only way we can do this is together.