Black and other minority communities - who often live in the areas most-at-risk from climate change threats, with few resources to adapt - can face some of the harshest impacts from extreme weather, as Reverend Mariama White-Hammond discovered while helping families recover after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

That's one reason the Boston pastor has helped drive an environmental justice movement in her U.S. hometown, to try to reduce the inequities that make poorer minority families more vulnerable to everything from worsening heatwaves to air pollution.

She says the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer who pinned Floyd's neck to the ground with his knee, highlights the systemic racism that puts minority communities at the frontline of climate and environmental risks.

"There are deep connections between why we live in a world where we recognize that the way we're living is hurting people's lungs … and why a police officer would think it's okay to put his knee in someone's neck until they asphyxiate," she told our correspondent Shannon Larson.

Those risks to the vulnerable are evident around the world, including as the coronavirus pandemic drives an economic slowdown that is putting people out of work and making it much harder to earn a living.

In India, pastoralists who raise cattle, camels and sheep, and sell the animals or the milk for an income, find their markets closed down and their movements restricted to try to stem the spread of COVID-19. 

"Villagers are afraid that we are carriers of coronavirus," Sumer Singh Bhati, who owns about 200 camels in Rajasthan, told correspondent Soumya Sarkar. "We were sometimes even prevented from going to village shops to buy food rations."

Virus restrictions have "broken the back of camel herders," Bhati said.

In Pakistan, the pandemic is one reason that efforts to put in place badly needed early warning systems - to protect vulnerable remote mountain residents from flash floods as glaciers melt - have dragged, writes correspondent Rina Saeed Khan.

But stimulus funds to try to restart coronavirus-flattened economies - if spent in smart ways - could not only get people back to work but build a "greener, smarter and fairer world" that is better prepared to avoid the worsening poverty and inequality that could result from the virus shock, while tackling climate change, world leaders said this week.

"We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis. Its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change" - Britain's Prince Charles

How should we spend the money? Good options include creating jobs in insulating houses, installing solar panels, planting trees, building flood walls and shoring up water reservoirs and improving water harvesting, experts say.

Some of the most climate-vulnerable countries - from Jamaica to Gabon to Kenya - have such ideas as part of stepped-up national plans to reduce planet-heating emissions and adapt to climate threats. Countries that signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement to battle climate change are due to deliver new, more ambitious plans this year, and some of the poorest countries are crossing the finish line first, writes Megan Rowling.

With trillions of dollars in stimulus cash available,  and a pandemic and racial protests driving growing awareness of the need for fundamental change, now is the time to make the big shifts needed to set the world on a more resilient - and equitable path - leaders say.

Without that, we could all face "amplification of many of the events we see today - polarisation, nationalism, racism and ultimately social unrest and conflicts", warned Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

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