The new coronavirus may prove disastrous for the world’s poorest people, including those living in slums and refugee camps. Cases were slower to appear in low-income economies, but almost nowhere has escaped the pandemic. Pakistan has been the worst hit country in south Asia, with 2291 cases and troops deployed across cities to enforce a national lockdown. Elsewhere, Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has reported 16 cases. In Africa, most cases have been in relatively affluent South Africa and Egypt, but other countries are seeing rises too. Burkina Faso now has more than 250 cases, Senegal 190 and Ghana 195. Across the continent, there are now more than 7000 cases. The impact of the virus in many low-income economies is likely to be very different to rich ones such as the UK, says Azra Ghani at Imperial College London. Demographics are one big difference. The world’s poorest typically live in households containing more people, with all generations living toge...

Does climate change affect all of us? Yes indeed. But never all of us in the same way. And while most European climate activists are concerned with ‘the future of all of us’, they forget that for some people climate change is -and has been- an issue for quite some time. And guess what, the people hit hardest are probably not the ones reading this article right now. The concept of environmental racism was coined in the United States in the early 1980’s. First used by activists, the term was quickly adopted by scholars and researchers from various disciplines including geography, sociology and law which produced a pile of studies confirming the unequal distribution of environmental pollution burdens between different groups of people with “race” being the strongest determinant. Environmental racism, hence, is any practice leading to a different environmental impact on groups or individuals based on “race”. Environmental justice is the name of a movement that evolved in response to those ...