Your world. Your verdict:

Change a light bulb – and help save the planet. When it comes to the big question of how the world responds to the threat of climate change, it is clear that it is the small, everyday things that can really matter.

This is a major theme to have emerged in the phenomenal response to The Independent’s appeal to readers for their views on how to tackle global warming, given the seeming inability of politicians, in Britain at least, to find ways of reducing carbon emissions.

But among the hundreds of letters and e-mails there are also demands for bigger, more fundamental changes – encouraging people to work from home, reducing packaging on consumer goods, enforced recycling and banning four-wheel drives from cities.

Fundamentally, there is also an underlying message common to ideas both big and small: that people desperately want politicians to take action to make these things come about. It is based in the knowledge that this must be a collective issue and that for every one of us who voluntarily makes those big and small adjustments in our lifestyles, there are many millions more who need to be told, encouraged and, if necessary, forced to make the moves needed to preserve the future for their children – and those of everybody else.

The Independent