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 …
This Handbook is designed to provide jurists with an overview of environmental constitutionalism: we address what it is, the peculiar practical and procedural issues it presents, and how courts from around the globe have engaged it. Environmental constitutionalism is a relatively recent phenomenon at the confluence of constitutional law, international …
Canada’s universal health care system does not include universal coverage of prescription drugs. We sought to estimate the effects of adding universal public coverage of an essential medicines list to existing public drug plans in Canada. Original Source
Among Canadian youth, 18% have tried cigarettes, with the range increasing from 3% among children in grade 6 to 36% among youth in grade 12. A person who starts smoking as a child or youth is less likely to quit later in life than someone who starts later. Factors such …
• Using wood pellets to generate low-carbon electricity is a flawed policy that is speeding up not slowing down climate warming. • That's according to a new study which says wood is not carbon neutral and emissions from pellets are higher than coal. • Subsidies for biomass should be immediately …
This literature review analyzes current practices of electric power utilities to plan for the increased deployment of electric vehicles. The review summarizes a wide array of projects, initiatives, and examples where electric power utilities are helping to pave the way for the integration of electric vehicles on to the grid …
• A herd of plains bison has been reintroduced to Canada’s oldest national park, more than a century after the iconic North American animal roamed the Great Plains and eastern slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. • The government agency Parks Canada, released 16 selected bison in the Banff National …
Existing bottom-up emission inventories of methane from global oil and gas systems do not satisfactorily explain year-on-year variation in atmospheric methane estimated by top-down models. Using a novel bottom-up approach this study quantifies and attributes methane and ethane emissions from global oil and gas production from 1980 to 2012. Country-specific …
Abrupt shifts in natural resources and their markets are a ubiquitous challenge to human communities. Building resilient social-ecological systems requires approaches that are robust to uncertainty and to regime shifts. Harvesting diverse portfolios of natural resources and adapting portfolios in response to change could stabilize economies reliant on natural resources …
Climate change in Alaska is causing widespread environmental change that is damaging critical infrastructure. As climate change continues, infrastructure may become more vulnerable to damage, increasing risks to residents and resulting in large economic impacts. We quantified the potential economic damages to Alaska public infrastructure resulting from climate-driven changes in …
Canada has approved Kinder Morgan Inc’s hotly contested plan to twin a pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to the Pacific coast, setting up a battle with environmentalists who helped elect the prime minister, Justin Trudeau. The Liberal government, seeking to balance demands from both greens and the energy industry, …
Canada will require reduced carbon footprints for all fuels so that the country can achieve a 30-megatonne cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, the country's environment department said on Friday. The government will not mandate specific changes to fuels and will focus just on reducing their emissions, officials said …
Runoff of agricultural nutrients and sediments has led to re-eutrophication of lakes and impaired stream health in the Great Lakes Basin since around 2000 following earlier success in protecting water quality. Substantial investment in conservation actions has had insufficient impact, due in part to a limited basis for understanding the …
Canada announced on Monday it will virtually eliminate the use of traditional coal-fired electricity by 2030, a stance contrasting sharply with that of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to revive the sector. Canada's Liberal government ran on a platform to do more for the environment. Parliament last month …
Canada has announced plans to phase out the use of coal-fired electricity by 2030. The move is in stark contrast to President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to revive the American coal industry. Canada gives $3.3bn subsidies to fossil fuel producers despite climate pledge Read more The environment minister, Kathleen McKenna, said …
What usually comes to mind when speaking about biodiversity hotspots are tropical regions, pristine areas and magnificent forests. Meanwhile, it is quite rare that a city in a temperate zone is considered significant in terms of biodiversity, much less mentioned as a hotspot. Yet, the city of Ottawa together with …
A major factor for the population decline of Native Americans after European contact has been attributed to infectious disease susceptibility. To investigate whether a pre-existing genetic component contributed to this phenomenon, here we analyse 50 exomes of a continuous population from the Northwest Coast of North America, dating from before …
Most excess deaths that occur during extreme hot weather events do not have natural heat recorded as an underlying or contributing cause. This study aims to identify the specific individuals who died because of hot weather using only secondary data. A novel approach was developed in which the expected number …
Extreme large-scale North American cold events are associated with strong undulations in the tropospheric jet stream which bring cold polar air southward over the continent. Here we propose that these jet undulations are associated with the North American part of the Circumglobal Teleconnection Pattern—a pair of zonally oriented waves of …
Worldwide riverine thermal pollution patterns were investigated by combining mean annual heat rejection rates from power plants with once-through cooling systems with the global hydrological-water temperature model variable infiltration capacity (VIC)-RBM. The model simulates both streamflow and water temperature on 0.5° × 0.5° spatial resolution worldwide and by capturing their …
