Climate change is the single most pressing crisis facing our civilisation and our planet.

That is an inescapable fact, and so too are the impacts of climate change that are already taking a damaging toll on the mental health of people everywhere, from heat waves that are increasing suicide rates to floods and wildfires that traumatise the people affected, leaving stress, anxiety and depression in their wake.

But the consequence of how we frame climate change and the ecological crisis, how we talk about it, particularly with children and young people, and the ways in which focusing on devastation alone can lead to despair.

In 2019, I visited a young people's after-school club in Monmouthshire, and as we were talking about different political issues, one very young child said that every time he saw reports about climate change on the news, it made him feel scared. And the others were nodding in agreement - lots of them had felt this same fear.

That conversation had a big impact on me, because I think we’ve all become so used to the kind of shocking images that tend to accompany these reports: the upwardly spiralling graphs, facts and figures that flash on the screen, images of drowned villages, devastated crops, animals dying.

Now, I would not for a moment wish us to downplay the severity of the crisis that faces us, but rather, I’d argue we should reframe the way we talk about climate change, to focus on giving people a sense of agency in responding to the emergency.

Because if we empower people, if we give them tools to be active in the fight against the climate and ecological crises, to contribute to activities at a local level, to enable democratic participation in environmental decision making, and yes, if we ensure children and young people are given a comprehensive education on climate change, we can mitigate the risks I’m setting out.

So, what can be done now by the Welsh Government to address this?

I would like to see funding and support for programmes that focus on direct and collective action against climate change, because acting proactively allows people to become agents of change and to lessen the emotional toll and the sense of powerlessness.

It can help people to achieve tangible changes in their own communities, from tree planting to litter picks, and from cleaning rivers to the provision of community assets like green spaces that can be managed and used for allotments and food share schemes.

These types of projects reap benefits for the community and for the environment. But studies also show that collective action on climate change reduces feelings of loneliness; it allows people to share the burden, it propels people into a sense of solidarity, of unity, of hope.

The overarching need is for us to empower children and young people, as well as the general population to, yes, comprehend the scale of the problem, but to learn about it and to conceptualise of it in a way that focuses on what we can do—to couple talking about the effects of climate change with the concrete actions they and others can employ to address both climate change and nature decline.

If we are serious about achieving a green recovery in Wales, we have to start acting collectively and positively to ensure that everyone can play their part, that everyone has a stake in what we are doing that is tangible, that instead of anxiety, there is agency.