At last night’s 88th Academy Awards Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his first – and long overdue – Oscar for intense survival epic The Revenant, after six previous nominations.

Accepting the Best Actor award to a standing ovation and roaring applause, the 41-year-old used this platform to address urgent climate issues close to his heart. “Climate change is real,” he said. “It is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat affecting our species. We need to work together and stop procrastinating.”

Above the sound of the Award show’s grand music – which is meant to signal the end of a speech but, as the actor kept going, it just made it that much more epic – DiCaprio urged support for those people whose “voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed”. “Let us not taken this planet for granted,” he concluded. “I do not take tonight for granted.”

With this year’s Academy Awards being marred by #OscarsSoWhite controversy due to the all white nominations line up, DiCaprio’s speech was a refreshing, and vitally important, call to action.

To quote DiCaprio’s 2011 turn as J. Edgar Hoover,”When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes. A society unwilling to learn from the past is doomed.”