I WAS delighted to see that last week Clackmannanshire Council unanimously passed a motion recognising the destructive potential of climate change and declaring a climate emergency.

On top of that it commits the council to establishing a Community Climate Change Forum and develop a comprehensive Climate Change Strategy which includes young people in its development.

This is fantastic news for communities in the Wee County and Scotland more generally. If we are going to successfully tackle the climate emergency, then it will take all levels of government working in collaboration with communities.

The involvement of young people in the council's plans is especially encouraging. Not only were young people in large part responsible for thrusting the urgency of the climate crisis into the public consciousness through the global school strikes in 2019, they are also part of a generation who will suffer most acutely from a deteriorating climate.

The motion passed by the council also serves as an important reminder that the climate emergency will affect all of us.

In the past the environmental movement has perhaps been guilty of presenting climate change as a distant issue, something which affects rain forests or polar ice-caps.

Those are important, and have been suffering for a long time, but they are also distant. It's too easy to adopt an "out of sight, out of mind" approach when the focus is on something many hundreds of miles away.

By passing this motion the council has acknowledged not only that the climate emergency is real but that it will have a direct impact on communities in Clacks.

Increasingly, we see examples of extreme weather causing severe flooding, damaging homes and disrupting transport. Incidents like this are only going to become more frequent.

Avoiding a bleak future means radical change, that's why it's so important that communities and every section of society are proactively involved in the transition to a greener economy.

But those changes don't have to mean sacrifice. A massive shift to renewables will create thousands of new sustainable jobs in a cutting-edge sector.

Increased investment in public transport will make it cleaner, cheaper and more reliable opening opportunities for all of us to travel for work, education or leisure.

Making our homes warmer and more energy efficient will tackle fuel poverty and reduce bills for everyone.

Tackling the climate emergency isn't just about averting disaster, it's just as much about building a better society for everyone to enjoy.

There's no point downplaying the gravity of the climate emergency, it's serious and it's happening now.

That having been said there's also no point in giving up hope. Time is short, but we have the means to take the action necessary.

After a couple of years unlike any in living memory the late summer of 2019 seems like a long time ago. Not long after the schools went back more I joined 300 young people from across the region, most of them young, for a rally demanding climate action.

The young people there that day were part of a global movement and every single one of them was an inspiration. We owe them the brightest future we can offer.