Air quality is a major challenge globally and is the single greatest environmental risk to human health. More than 90 per cent of the world’s population lives in areas that exceed the World Health Organization guideline for healthy air. In North America, Canada and the United States of America have …
A new report by UNCTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, describes natural gas as a useful “bridge fuel” for States aiming to move towards more environmentally-friendly renewable power sources. But it has disadvantages too, not least the fact that its main component is methane gas, which has a …
Countries rely on out-of-pocket (OOP) spending to different degrees and employ varying techniques. The article examines trends in OOP spending in ten high-income countries since 2000, and analyzes their relationship to self-assessed barriers to accessing health care services. The countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, …
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the first successful human-to-human blood transfusion, conducted by James Blundell, an English obstetrician working just across the Thames from The Economist’s offices. Today blood is big business—with global exports worth more, in 2016, than global exports of aeroplanes. But that trade is distorted …
Tourism contributes significantly to global gross domestic product, and is forecast to grow at an annual 4%, thus outpacing many other economic sectors. However, global carbon emissions related to tourism are currently not well quantified. Here, we quantify tourism-related global carbon flows between 160 countries, and their carbon footprints under …
North America is in the midst of its most serious drug-overdose crisis in history. From 1999 through 2015, drug-overdose deaths approximately tripled in the United States, and the majority of such deaths now involve an opioid. In 2016 alone, there were 64,000 drug-overdose deaths in the United States — more …
Crested Auklets (Aethia cristatella) and Least Auklets (A. pusilla) are crevice-nesting birds that breed in large mixed colonies at relatively few sites in the Aleutian Island archipelago, Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, and Sea of Okhotsk. Many of these colonies are located on active volcanic islands. The eruption of Kasatochi …
With global warming, we can make predictions and then take measurements to test those predictions. One prediction (a pretty obvious one) is that a warmer world will have less snow and ice. In particular, areas that have year-round ice and snow will start to melt. Alpine glaciers are large bodies …
Polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs), including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and PAH-like compounds are known or probable environmental carcinogens released into the environment as a by-product of incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and other organic materials. Studies have shown that exposure to PACs in the environment can induce both genotoxicity and …
Bank holdings in “extreme” fossil fuels skyrocketed globally to $115bn during Donald Trump’s first year as US president, with holdings in tar sands oil more than doubling, a new report has found. A sharp flight from fossil fuels investments after the Paris agreement was reversed last year with a return …
Canada will likely miss a 2020 interim carbon emissions reduction target and will need to take strong measures if it further hopes to meet its Paris agreement commitment, said an audit released Tuesday. Canada had set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming by 17 percent …
This policy update provides a summary of Canada’s proposed federal clean fuel standard (CFS) policy structure based on proposals and the framework document from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), as well as discussion of the potential impacts of not addressing indirect land-use change (ILUC). Omitting ILUC is a significant …
Farmers, food supply-chain entities, and policymakers need a simple but robust indicator to demonstrate progress toward reducing nitrogen pollution associated with food production. We show that nitrogen balance—the difference between nitrogen inputs and nitrogen outputs in an agricultural production system—is a robust measure of nitrogen losses that is simple to …
This report reviews the literature on the impact of real-time information provision on consumer decision-making. In addition, it describes the results of a study in which about 7000 households in Ontario, Canada were provided with in-home displays linked to smart meters that provided real-time feedback on electricity consumption. The results …
The U.S. state of California and two Canadian provinces kicked off a cross-border auction of greenhouse gas emission credits on Wednesday, their first joint effort to buy and sell in the "cap and trade" market to fight global warming, experts said. The auction comes less than two months after the …
The global wind energy industry enjoyed another strong year in 2017, installing a total of 52,573 megawatts worth of new wind capacity, increasing the global cumulative installed capacity up to 539,581 megawatts (MW), as “dramatic price drops” exemplify the current state of play around the world. The Global Wind Energy …
Many policy interventions intended to benefit public health can only be evaluated as so-called natural experiments, because implementation is not controlled by researchers seeking to assess effectiveness. Such assessments can be complicated by non-comparability between people affected and not affected by the intervention. Various quasi-experimental designs have been proposed to …
Ambient air pollution is a major health risk globally. To reduce adverse health effects on days when air pollution is high, government agencies worldwide have implemented air quality alert programmes. Despite their widespread use, little is known about whether these programmes produce any observable public-health benefits. We assessed the effectiveness …
Effective habitat restoration requires an understanding of species habitat preferences and the associated mechanisms driving those preferences. We examined the patterns and causes of oviposition preference in the monarch butterfly, a rapidly declining species, in southwestern Ontario at both landscape and milkweed patch spatial scales. Additionally, we measured the abundance …
Constructing complete, accurate plant DNA barcode reference libraries can be logistically challenging for large-scale floras. Here we demonstrate the promise and challenges of using herbarium collections for building a DNA barcode reference library for the vascular plant flora of Canada. Original Source
The Mactaquac Dam and Generating Station, a 672 MW run-of-the-river hydroelectric facility located on the Saint John River, Canada, will have to be decommissioned or reconstructed by 2030. In order to simulate the impact of reservoir emptying (drawdown) and climate change on the thermal regime of the lower reaches of …
