Welcome to Frontlines, our relaunched climate change newsletter. Starting this week, we aim to bring you insight into how the day's big issues fit together - and how climate change is at the heart of many of them. We hope it's an approach you'll like - please let us know!

Let's start with food:

When panic buying set in at the start of the coronavirus lockdown, leaving supermarket aisles around the world stripped of goods, shoppers in the United Arab Emirates found themselves facing a rather different experience: fully stocked shelves.

That’s because the desert country, which imports about 80% of its food, had been worrying about the threat of global food shortages as a result of climate change. So in recent years it invested heavily in growing more of its own food – often in greenhouses, using desalinated water - as well as shoring up imports, our reporter Rabiya Jaffery found.

When the pandemic hit, shutting down a share of the world’s food trade, that effort to build resilience to coming threats paid off – just one example of how preparing now for climate threats can have unexpected benefits in a more uncertain world.

But that’s not happening everywhere. In fact, plenty of the world’s farmers are feeling huge pressure from worsening extreme weather – and now the COVID-19 pandemic as well.

In Kenya, farmer Dennis Onyango has replanted his rice field three times this year after repeated floods – but says he would not have money to do it a fourth time.

"I have been a rice farmer for the past 15 years, but what I have witnessed in the past few weeks has been catastrophic. I have never seen this before," he told our reporter Dominic Kirui.

With border trade also facing temporary restrictions as a result of the pandemic, Kenya – like many other countries – could face worsening food insecurity this year, officials warn.

Poorer countries are urging that the delay to the COP26 U.N. climate summit – it’s now been pushed back a full year – shouldn’t mean delays in crucial climate action, including the delivery of promised cash to pay for more ambitious emissions cuts and efforts to adapt to worsening threats.

"From floods in East Africa to Super Cyclone Amphan in Bangladesh, for the least-developed countries, the climate crisis is a daily reality. Scaled-up action to address climate change remains urgent," noted Sonam Wangdi of Bhutan, chair of a group of 47 of the world’s poorest countries.

With climate change likely to bring a "more intense form" of the problems seen with coronavirus, experts say, preparation can't come too early - and it might even pay off early as well.

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