Linda Fabiani

Our young people here in East Kilbride, from primary school through senior school and beyond – indeed, even in nursery school – have an awareness of our planet in ways that my generation never did.

They know about the damage to the earth as we humans use resources and embrace new technologies without always recognising the long-term effects: plastics, for example, make day-to-day life easier for us, but are having devastating effects on our oceans and marine life.

We’ve all been hearing over some years now of climate change, how living our lives as we do is speeding that up, damaging our own communities and populations across the world.

International obligations have been set to arrest this as far as possible.

That’s why the Scottish Government introduced its Climate Change Bill last week – Scotland, already recognised as a global leader in tackling climate change, playing its part. Our low carbon transition is well underway already with emissions down 38 per cent.

This proposed legislation sets targets to reduce our carbon emissions by 2050 by 90 per cent, with annual targets so that the Scottish Government can be held to account for progress each and every year, for every sector of our economy.

The Committee on Climate Change – a UK Committee which comprises a panel of independent, expert advisers – have described this target as being currently “the limit of feasibility”.

This will, of course, be subject to ongoing review and the Scottish Government will be legally obliged to pay heed to that.

There are some