THE climate emergency has never been more visible. Record-breaking heat in Australia, record-breaking cold in the USA, and a huge chunk of ice has broken away from the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf in north-east Greenland.

While the Los Angeles Times called the wildfires there a “climate apocalypse”, there has also been evidence of this breakdown closer to home. In February, Storm Dennis brought with a month’s worth of rainfall in just 48 hours and that pattern has been repeated several times since, interspersed with some of the hottest weather on record. Now, winter is coming.

The evidence of climate breakdown no longer resides in academic papers, it’s plain for all to see. No wonder our young people are once again making their voices heard today in the latest global climate strike. They know, even if our governments don’t, the urgency of the situation. There has been a very real impact from this extreme weather on Scotland’s infrastructure. Landslips closed the A83 at the Rest and Be Thankful in Argyll, the Union Canal collapse at Polmont which shut the Glasgow-to-Edinburgh railway line and a further landslip affecting the West Highland Line.

Sadly, two landslips contributed to the derailment at Stonehaven where three people lost their lives, despite the valiant efforts of emergency services and railway workers.

The Transport Secretary said afterwards: “We are experiencing an ever-increasing number of very localised, intense weather events that are having an impact on the rail network and the transport network overall.”

Network Rail has worked hard to assess the impact of climate change on our railways, but the body admitted it “is an area that is accelerating faster than our assumptions”. ScotRail boss Alex Hynes has said: “The railway in this country can no longer cope because of climate change.”

Quite. The question then becomes what are we going to do about it? Clearly, we need to reduce transport emissions as fast as we can to stop contributing to this breakdown.

Transport is the single biggest source of net carbon emissions in Scotland and these emissions have increased since 1990 rather than gone down.

This is frustrating, not just because of the obvious environmental impact but because the solutions are so clearly within our grasp.

But we also need to recognise that our transport infrastructure was built for a temperate climate and is not prepared for the extreme storms and floods that are becoming more frequent in Scotland.

I commend those who work tirelessly to keep the railway open, but they are working on a 19th and 20th-century network that desperately needs upgraded to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

To achieve both of these things we need a robust strategy to be drawn up to protect public transport infrastructure from the climate emergency. It’s something I’ve been calling on for some time, but the case for this is now more urgent than ever.

Clearly, just like all transport options, railways will always be susceptible to weather-related delays. But tracks being covered by landslips or extreme flooding or being swept away entirely is another level.

Building resilience can’t just be about investing in a single project, it has to be about making the whole network more able to adapt to change and rapidly return to service after disruption. It would be easier to take a strategic approach if the railways were publicly owned, of course.

And in climate-proofing our railways, there would be opportunities to improve them. Incredibly, there is still only one lane of rail on the majority of the 118-mile Highland mainline, making it difficult to compete with roads for passengers or freight.

One breakdown can, and regularly does, bring the whole network to a halt.

The significant planned investment to make the equivalent A9 trunk road four lanes, meanwhile, will only make rail less attractive at a time when we need it more than ever.

Instead of driving more traffic on to our roads by making them wider, we should be improving and climate-proofing our existing road network in the places that need it.

It’s clear that commitments to eye-catching road infrastructure projects by both the UK and Scottish governments – while they pay lip service to growing our public transport infrastructure – simply don’t recognise the very visible climate emergency around us.

The Borders Railway is a good example. Much was made about the £353 million cost, but that is dwarfed by the cost of road expansions. Amid rows about its economic case, it was not electrified or future-proofed and built as a single-lane track. Public confidence can only come from more ambition than that.

There have been countless landslides at Rest and Be Thankful. If we’re going to future-proof the link into the Cowal peninsula, why not have the ambition to consider a rail bridge as well as a road to serve that community?

It’s time to take Scotland’s railways and the climate emergency seriously. We need more ambition if we are to provide an effective breakdown recovery and keep Scotland moving.