LOCAL women Lin Scrannage and Maggi Taylor Sanders were among the thousands of people who joined a mass lobbying of MPs at Parliament to address the pressing issue of climate change.

Lin, from Presteigne, said “This was the first time either of us had taken part in a large rally in London and we did so because we feel so strongly that man-made climate change is the most important problem the world faces in its entire history. Last week we got together with friends and made bunting which contained messages about how important the things we love in our day-to-day lives are - bees, swifts, beetles, sunflowers, our children, our homes, the life in our seas, the water we depend upon for life, the air we breathe...we sewed and stitched our hopes and took them down to London to join the thousands of other messages from all over the country.

The people who had travelled from Wales were fortunate to be able to meet up with their MPs inside the Houses of Parliament, and Maggi and I met up with Chris Davies inside the lobby of the House. We expressed our concerns to Chris that the government had a duty of care to its citizens to take climate change seriously and to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy as quickly as possible, and asked him to do everything he could in his constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire to support that transition.

Maggi said ''We can't go on with business as usual, it's simply not sustainable. We all have to make decisions about how much we can go on consuming and using up the world's resources, which are running out,'' Lin said. ''If we go on burning fossil fuels at the current rate, in 17 years from now we will have reached the point of runaway climate change.''