Unless major carbon emitters drastically reduce their pollution and pay for the poor to prepare for coming disasters, suffering will be an everyday reality. Global financial support to build climate-resilient and green societies is negligible, leaving developing countries to fend for themselves.

A new study on climate change’s effects on Hong Kong subdivided flat residents found nearly 60 per cent of those surveyed experienced hotter temperatures in their flats than outside. Drastically reducing emissions and allocating more climate financing to adaptation are essential to easing the suffering of the world’s most vulnerable

The government has been protecting employers against the Covid-19 fallout, but it should help the unemployed and underemployed too. One way is to offer unemployment insurance, as other advanced economies are doing.

The city must set up a public central register of beneficial owners to make it less attractive as a tax haven, making it harder to move dirty money.

More than a million people live in poverty in Hong Kong, with the working poor making up a large percentage of this number. When the statutory minimum wage was implemented in 2011, many had high hopes.

Developed countries like the US, Britain, Ireland and New Zealand all have low-income family subsidy schemes or tax credits to tackle poverty among the working poor and encourage people to find work. Yet in Hong Kong, a place that values the work ethic, there are no similar measures to support the more than 170,000 working poor families - equivalent to half the poor population.