Giving Compass' Take:

• Laurie Goering reports that Amnesty International is calling out the slow progress that the world has made in preventing and preparing for catastrophic climate change.

• How can funders support vulnerable communities and help them prepare for climate change? 

• Learn about using evidence to prioritize and address environmental risks. 

Amnesty International's new chief, Kumi Naidoo, has little patience for UN climate change talks that have made slow progress for decades but left the world heading for disaster.

"The return on investment I would say should cause us to pause and reflect," Naidoo said in an interview this week, as talks resumed in Bangkok on hammering out guidelines to put the painstakingly agreed 2015 Paris climate deal into practice.

Around the world, climate change is putting more people at risk from extreme heat waves, wilder storms, sea level rise, and worsening droughts, floods, and wildfires.

If not quickly tackled, scientists say, global warming is likely to bring large-scale food and water shortages and force more people to migrate, while exacerbating problems such as human trafficking, land conflicts, and early marriage of girls.

"We are at five minutes to midnight. We're right there at the precipice," said the South African-born activist, who spent his youth as an anti-apartheid campaigner.

But protection for those hit by climate-related disasters is limited. People forced to leave their homes by climate pressures like recurring drought, for instance, are not classified as refugees and cannot access the same support systems.

One particularly promising avenue for action is the growing crescendo of lawsuits brought against oil companies and other climate polluters, Naidoo said.

So far more than a thousand climate-related cases have been filed, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

Among them, 21 young plaintiffs in the US state of Oregon charge that the nation's fossil fuel-heavy energy system deprives them of their "constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property."

Read the full article about catastrophic climate change by Laurie Goering of the Thomson Reuters Foundation at Global Citizen.