My wife and I are anxiously watching the Californian forest fires.

One of our daughters recently moved to Southern California, and although she is currently several miles from the southern most blaze, you never know what might happen. These Californian forest fires have been horrific and so destructive both of property and lives.

President Trump blames forest management, but we all know the root cause is global warming. Indeed, the Intergovernmental panel on climate change warned of warmer, dryer summers as a result.

In this country we have ourselves seen forest fires in Yorkshire and we have been told by the Met office that our summers are warmer and dryer.

Global warming not only increases the risk of forest fires, it raises sea levels, spreads diseases, destroys the coral reef and reduces tropical crop yields. Most significantly it also increases the violence of the weather systems - as America has also experienced first hand with storms Maria, Florence and Michael.

It beggars belief that the US should be so badly (and expensively ) affected by climate change, yet have elected a President who denies man-made climate change and refuses to take steps to mitigate it.

It will be particularly ironic if Florida elects a Republican Senator and Governor, while Miami is in high risk of being submerged.

Here in Cumbria, as I have written before, we are very alive to the dangers of climate change, having experienced dreadful flooding and infrastructure damage in the past few years.

My colleague Cllr Dyan Jones and I have visited several communities in the district to meet with concerned residents to talk about climate change.

We invited participants at our meetings to suggest measures we could take to contribute, in some small way, to the mitigation of global warming.

We received many ideas. Having discussed them with council officers and looked at the resources available to the council, we have started with a list of actions which include: forming a speakers panel with South Lakeland Action for Climate Change, to speak with community groups, societies, businesses, and possibly schools about the issues. We are completing an inventory of all our buildings to see if we can add solar panels, we are procuring energy efficient vehicles, we intend to campaign to stop cars idling, we will lobby government to allow us to require more sustainable housing....and much more (a full list is on our website).

While local government cannot provide the complete answer to climate change, there is a lot that we can and must do. We in South Lakeland are determined to play our part.