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Environmental racism: New study investigates whether Nova Scotia dump boosted cancer rates in nearby Black community

Environmentally dangerous dumps, landfills and pulp and paper mills are more likely to be sited in African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities. These communities suffer from high rates of cancer and respiratory illness. (Shutterstock) — Ingrid Waldron, *McMaster University* and Juliet Daniel, *McMaster University*

In the 1940s, the town of Shelburne, N.S., became home to a new garbage dump. Residential, industrial and medical waste from throughout eastern Shelburne County was burned at the dump over the decades, leaving nearby residents concerned about health issues.

The dump was situated uphill from the African Nova Scotian South End community, whose roots date back to the settlement of Black Loyalists who were evacuated from the United States after the Revolutionary War of 1776. Those near the dump worked, played and lived amid constant smells and smoke from burning garbage. The dump operated for 75 years, closing in 2016.

The placement of this dump was an act of what we now refer to as environmental racism — the disproportionate siting of polluting industries and other environmentally hazardous projects in Indigenous, Black and other marginalized communities.

Questions about the high rates of cancer — and deaths — among members of Shelburne’s African Nova Scotian community, compared to their white neighbours on the other side of town or even within the South End, have long simmered. We, along with our colleagues, are embarking on a major research project to determine whether the legacy of the dump may be even more sinister than people knew at the time.

Community-based research on environmental racism

Much of the motivation for the study comes from the work of local activist Louise Delisle, who has gone door-to-door in her community to catalogue cases of cancer, both recent and historical.

Previous and ongoing research and advocacy conducted through the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health Project (the ENRICH Project), data in the book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities and experiences of environmental racism shared by Nova Scotian community members in the Netflix documentary of the same name, confirm the necessity for such an investigation.

Map showing communities and toxic facilities in Nova Scotia — Locations of African Nova Scotian communities, First Nations communities and toxic facilities in Nova Scotia.
(ENRICH Project)

The data collected by the ENRICH Project over the years indicate that environmentally dangerous projects like dumps, landfills and pulp and paper mills are more likely to be sited in African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities, and that these communities suffer from high rates of cancer and respiratory illness.

Momentum to address environmental racism is also growing. A federal private member’s bill introduced by Nova Scotia MP Lenore Zann, the National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism, passed second reading on March 24, 2021.

Bill C-230 returned to the federal Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development on June 21 for amendments, where it was approved a few days later. It will move to third reading in the fall of 2021, and then to the Senate, after which it may become Canada’s first legislation to address environmental racism.

Many factors influence cancer

As many factors can influence the incidence of cancer within a population, we’ll oversee a team spanning several research disciplines, with McMaster University serving as the hub and significant representation from Dalhousie University, co-ordinated by cancer biologist Paola Marignani.

‘There’s Something in the Water’ official trailer.

Environmental chemical exposures, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), can interact with biological and genetic factors, as well as social determinants of health, such as access to health care, race, gender and income, and lifestyle factors, such as diet, physical activity and smoking.

Our team will probe the contents of the dump to identify harmful materials such as heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter, and we will examine genetic and epigenetic changes to the genomes of Shelburne residents that may explain cancer susceptibility.

We will also examine the extent to which race, gender, income and other social determinants of health contribute to cancer and premature death. The role of diet, exercise, smoking and other lifestyle factors in cancer incidence in Shelburne will also be studied given that existing studies indicate that these factors can increase our likelihood of getting cancer.

Cancer in Black communities

The study is multidisciplinary and complex. Yet we are confident it will help clarify the complex interactions between the social determinants of health, lifestyle factors, genetics and generational impact of chronic toxin exposure. It will also shed light on what is driving high cancer rates in South End Shelburne.

Our study will not just have value for the small community of Shelburne but will provide a template for further studies on the relationship between environmental racism and chronic diseases. For example, the African Nova Scotian community in Lincolnville, N.S., Indigenous communities such as Wet’suwet’en First Nation in northern B.C., and Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia, Ont., as well as African Americans living near Cancer Alley in Louisiana, who all live close to landfills, pipelines and petrochemical facilities, could all benefit from a similar multidisciplinary approach.

This study, and others like it, will bring us one step closer to addressing the wider problem of systemic racism in Canada.

Ingrid Waldron, Professor, Faculty of Humanities, HOPE Chair in Peace & Health, McMaster University and Juliet Daniel, Professor, Department of Biology, McMaster University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate change: what G7 leaders could have said – but didn’t

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Extinction Rebellion Big Heads pose as G7 leaders, St Ives, Cornwall, Britain, 13 June 2021. Extinction Rebellion have described the last day of the G7 event as an “All hands on deck day” calling on everybody who can, to stand up and take action on climate change. Britain is hosting the G7 summit in Cornwall in from 11 to 13 June 2021. EPA-EFE/JON ROWLEY

Myles Allen, University of Oxford

The four-day G7 summit in Cornwall ended with little cause for celebration from anyone worried about climate change. Most of the pledges that emerged were relatively old news, with the UK repeating its promise of £500 million for ocean conservation efforts and the group reaffirming its commitment to end support for coal production abroad.

The leaders of (supposedly) the world’s richest democracies failed again to agree to new funding to help poorer parts of the world invest in green technology and adapt to extreme weather.

But more interesting than these pledges and non-pledges were the things that weren’t mentioned at all. One of the greatest unmentionables at climate summit after climate summit is just how badly we keep track of contributions to global warming.

It’s the elephant in the room at any gathering where the leaders of rich countries discuss climate change: historical responsibility. Everyone knows that G7 nations have contributed disproportionately to the global warming that has already happened. But exactly how much more?

If you search online for which country has caused most global warming, you find a list of how much countries emit each year. Delve deeper, and the next thing you find is how much they have reduced their emissions since 1990. This flatters mature economies, whose emissions are declining. But for carbon dioxide – the effects of which last almost indefinitely (and to an only slightly lesser degree, nitrous oxide, a byproduct of fertiliser production and use) – it’s accumulated emissions over time that determine a country’s contribution to global warming, not emissions in any given year.

A graph comparing cumulative emissions from G7 nations with India and China. — Cumulative CO₂ emissions indicate national contributions to CO₂-induced warming. Contributions to total human-induced warming are needed to track progress on Paris goals.
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser/Our World in Data

Focusing on current emissions is particularly kind to the G7’s host. The UK’s emissions have declined sharply since 1990, but the country did start belching carbon dioxide out of its dark satanic mills almost 100 years before the rest of the world caught on. A tonne of carbon dioxide emitted by an English cotton mill in 1800 is having exactly the same impact on global temperature today as a tonne of carbon dioxide emitted by a Vietnamese power station in 2021.

Brazil promoted an effort to quantify country-level contributions to global warming in the 2000s, but it was quietly allowed to die. At present, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the main forum for international climate action, only requires countries to report their contributions to emissions, not warming. And everyone else, from corporations to personal carbon footprint calculators, follows suit.

“Isn’t that the same thing?” you might ask. Sadly, no. The method the UNFCCC has settled on to report emissions reflects their effect on the balance between the energy the Earth absorbs from the Sun and the energy it emits back into space over the 100 years after the date of the emission. This is somewhat related to their effect on global temperature, but it is a very long way from the same thing.

For emissions that accumulate in the atmosphere over decades to centuries, like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, the distinction doesn’t matter. But for methane, and a host of other climate pollutants that persist from only a few days to a couple of decades, it matters a lot. Any country contemplating setting up a fracking industry (notorious for leaking methane) can be quietly confident that it will be 100 years before the warming effect of their fugitive methane emissions will be accurately reflected in their reports to the UNFCCC.

Landing the plane with one eye shut

In the Paris Agreement, the world set itself a very ambitious goal. The headline goal is not about emissions, but to limit the rise in global average temperature to “well below 2°C”, pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C if possible.

That’s a good thing. By and large, the effects of climate change depend on how much we warm the planet overall, not warming by any given date, or the rate of emissions and warming at any given time, and certainly not planetary energy imbalance summed over an arbitrary time horizon. But right now, it is impossible to take stock of progress towards this temperature goal because countries, in their plans for 2030 and beyond, only report aggregate emissions using this rather odd accounting system that doesn’t reflect the effect of these emissions on global temperature.

If rich countries like the G7 are serious about stopping global warming, a good start might be clarifying who and what is causing it. There is no prospect of the UNFCCC changing its accounting system, but it does allow countries to report additional information if they deem it relevant.

And what could be more relevant than actual contributions to global warming? At COP26, the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021, the G7 nations could step up and declare they will henceforth report, in addition to their emissions, how much warming they have caused already, how much they continue to cause, and how much they propose to cause in future.

All the information exists. Warming contributions can be calculated using precisely the same formulae used for the UNFCCC’s own emissions reporting. It is simply a matter of putting the numbers out there and encouraging everyone else to do the same.

This isn’t just about outing the guilty rich. Acknowledging what is causing warming should focus minds on what it will take to stop it. And if we add up the G7’s planned contributions to future warming – never mind the contributions from China, India and the rest – it will soon become clear that we don’t just need to stop causing global warming as soon as possible, but we also need to be able to reverse it by taking carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere and storing it, safely and permanently, somewhere else. Which is another topic they prefer to avoid at climate summits.

Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science, Director of Oxford Net Zero, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Let’s Chalk About Climate – Edmonton

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Export Development Canada Could Face Legal Challenge for Fossil Industry Financial Support

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Photo by Isabella Mendes from Pexels

Export Development Canada (EDC) may face court action in the not-too-distant future, after a legal opinion commissioned by Oil Change International and several other organizations concluded that national export credit agencies have an international legal obligation to scale back their financing for fossil fuel-related activities.

The 99-page legal opinion concludes that export credit agencies (ECAs) share countries’ responsibility to scale back their fossil fuel financing, consistent with “scientific considerations and the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement,” wrote Oil Change, Above Ground, and Environmental Defence Canada, in a letter yesterday to International Trade Minister Mary Ng.

Oil Change says the opinion points to “five key actions” ECAs must take to uphold their international legal obligations with respect to the climate crisis:

• Not finance new fossil projects or activities, or increase financing for existing ones;

• Decrease existing fossil support “within a clear, scientifically-based time frame”;

• Avoid locking in fossil projects that might use up a significant part of the remaining global carbon budget;

• Adopt and proactively implement adequate procedures to assess the carbon footprint of potential projects;

• Implement performance guidelines to monitor their activities in the context of the climate emergency.

In a Q&A accompanying the opinion, Oil Change identifies Canada as one of four countries that accounted for 79% of fossil fuel support among G20 export credit agencies between 2016 and 2018. It pinpoints EDC as “the largest ECA supporter of fossil fuels, largely because of unusually high levels of domestic project finance.”

Past research has pointed to Canada as the second-largest provider of public financing to fossil fuels in the G20 between 2017 and 2019, and the largest per capita. In January, Oil Change and 52 other Canadian organizations said EDC’s average financial support for the fossil sector exceeded C$13 billion per year in the three years after the Paris Agreement was signed, between 2016 and 2019.

In a release, Oil Change Research Analyst Bronwen Tucker said the legal opinion “follows moves by the U.S., EU, and UK toward phasing out international public finance for fossil fuels. Canada, by contrast, has no plan to end the support it provides to fossil fuel companies” through EDC.

In the wake of the opinion, organizations are still at a “scoping” stage to decide whether to pursue legal action in Canada, Tucker told The Energy Mix yesterday. She declined to say whether the groups had engaged legal counsel.

“The application of different international law obligations and norms is slightly different in each country’s domestic law, so there’s research to be done around the specific implications of this opinion for Canada,” she explained. “But definitely, knowing that EDC is the worst offender for fossil fuel finance out of the G20, and likely every economy, there’s definitely a really outsized exposure for the size of our country.”

While the groups’ initial missive to Ng, two other cabinet ministers, and EDC President and CEO Mairead Lavery was technical and legalistic in tone, “there’s still time to be more pointed than we were in the letter today,” Tucker said.

“This legal opinion puts States and their export credit agencies on notice,” added Oil Change Senior Campaigner Laurie van der Burg. “They need to stop financing fossil fuel projects or face potential litigation risks. The opinion launched today puts serious legal muscle behind what was already a compelling moral and financial imperative: public money should not be used to prop up dirty projects and aggravate the dire climate crisis that is already affecting millions across the globe.”

Oil Change and its international partners commissioned the legal opinion from Cambridge University public international law specialist Jorge E. Viñuales and barrister Kate Cook, a specialist in public international law, climate change, and human rights law. “Given the substantial contribution of ECAs to enable the emissions of greenhouse gases associated with existing and new fossil fuel-related projects/activities, in principle, States comply with their duty of due diligence only if they do their utmost to reduce their contribution to the problem, rather than extending it or increasing it,” they wrote.

“If the extremely dangerous consequences of climate change are to be averted or, more modestly, their likelihood reduced, there is no room for additional fossil fuel capacity and existing capacity, or its emissions must be reduced urgently and proactively,” the two lawyers added.

EDC External Communications Advisor Anil Handa said the agency operates at arm’s length from the government, based on policies that often “extend beyond” requirements set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The legal opinion points to the need to “expand the OECD restrictions on export finance for coal-fired power to cover all fossil fuels and associated infrastructure, in line with the Paris Agreement goals,” Oil Change writes.

Handa said the EDC’s first carbon reduction target, released last year, calls for the agency to reduce the “exposure to carbon-intensive sectors in our lending portfolio” by 15% by December 31, 2023.

“We unequivocally understand the urgency in addressing climate change and are committed to doing our part,” he wrote in an email. “Conducting business in a responsible manner is integral to EDC,” and “supporting and enabling sustainable business are integral to EDC’s core values and strategy as an organization.”

Handa added that the EDC reduced its business support to the oil and gas sector to $8.1 billion in 2020, from $10.6 billion in 2019 and $12.5 billion in 2018, citing a sector-by-sector disclosure statement on the agency’s website. Between 2015 and 2020, he added, support for cleantech businesses grew from $917 million and 86 companies to $4.55 billion and 288 companies.

“It’s important to bear in mind that oil and gas companies are important partners for the cleantech sector as they help support the development and commercialization of cleantech solutions,” Handa said.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether any of the funding to sectors like mining, plastics, or financial institutions—more than $30 billion according to the disclosure statement—mapped back to fossil industry clients. Nor does the statement indicate whether the $4.55 billion to cleantech included funding for carbon capture or fossil industry emissions abatement that governments often announce as climate or cleantech investments, but are widely seen as efforts to extend the life of carbon-intensive fossil operations.

Reprinted with permission from The Energy Mix

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Steve MacLellan

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Tag Archives: politics

Climate change: what G7 leaders could have said – but didn’t

Let’s Chalk About Climate – Edmonton

Export Development Canada Could Face Legal Challenge for Fossil Industry Financial Support