Action is needed now on climate change

WHETHER you care to acknowledge it or not, climate change is part of all our lives. And it is that acknowledgement that needs to be addressed. While many people now accept that it is happening, there are still those who choose to live in denial.

Those who continue to hold out in the face of increasingly overwhelming evidence are now thankfully in the minority.

‘Once in a hundred years/lifetime’ weather events now appear to roll around with terrifying regularity and it is hard to deny what is happening in front of you on the news all the time.

Witness the floods which have ravaged large parts of the UK in recent years, and now appear to be an annual occurrence.

But one only needs to look at the opprobrium heaped on activists like Greta Thunberg to see how vocal these deniers can be.

Attitudes still need to be changed. And we here at The News want to be part of that change. While many of us are happy to pay lip-service to how bad climate change is, how many of us can honestly say we back that up with action?

In 2019 Portsmouth City Council unanimously passed a Climate Emergency motion, committing them to reducing the local authority’s and city-wide carbon emissions to net zero by 2030.

This week, along with the council’s Climate Action

Board, The News has launched its Going For Green campaign which has three goals:

Raise awareness of the climate and ecological emergency

Inspire and facilitate climate action in Portsmouth — within all sectors and communities

Help develop a Portsmouth Climate Action Strategy

So now is the time for us all to start backing these words up with actions – we’re not talking protests here – if you look at page nine, there are practical ways many of us can get involved.