Climate change is here, its important and its our common responsibility to deal with. As climate change progresses, many people are going to be affected by floods, famine, lost land and human events. And many people feel strongly about calling us all to action – today is blog action day for climate change and we want to do our bit to help our planet.

Climate change obviously affects water. The obvious impact for Victorians in recent years has been hotter weather and less rain leading to the draught and Black Saturday – there is no reason to believe that temperatures will drop back to what they were 20 or 50 fifty years ago, so we need to be careful with our water supplies if we want to survive.

The other impact, eventually, will be an increase in sea levels. In one sense we could be pleased about additional water but the reality is that sea water is too salty for us and desalination plants are expensive and have their own issues.

We believe it is important to work against climate change – at least we can slow it down. Some of the steps we think will help are:

• encourage households to introduce general environmental practises (turing off unwanted lights, saving water, putting on a jumper not a heater, etc)
• encouraging people to add conservation facilities to their homes, such as water tanks, solar hot water systems, solar power generators and good insulation
• reducing our reliance on cars – let’s walk more and travel by train, tram or bus for longer distances
• ensuring all new buildings (not just houses) are energy efficient – that means designing them properly rather than just adding a few environmentally friendly features to a poor design
• educate ourselves and our children about the impact of our daily choices – for example, how much does it cost the environment to choose a Victorian apple compared to an apple from overseas?

What is your favourite tip for reducing climate change? How important do you consider conserving water as part of working against climate change?