Dr. Trevor Hancock – Healthy people, healthy communities, a healthy planet

28 December 2021

Dr. Trevor Hancock

700 words

. . . well, world peace, of course; an end to poverty, hatred and discrimination in all its forms; reconciliation with Indigenous people in Canada and around the world; serious action on climate change and an end to the ravaging of nature and instead a re-establishment of reverence for the Earth – oh, and an end to Covid too.

Utopian? Yes, of course. But then, who would wish for the opposite of those things? Achievable? Well, certainly not in the coming year, but I would be happy with at least some signs of progress in all those areas, both globally and locally. But key to any substantial progress are some profound reflections on our present situation.

Many years ago Don Toppin, a Canadian futurist, suggested that too often we pay attention to the important rather than to the critical; what catches our attention now, compared to what really affects our long-term future, even our existence.  For example, while Covid is important it is not critical, it is far from being the greatest challenge we face.

Indeed this newspaper itself was taken to task just a month ago by Pastor Don Johnson for suggesting in an editorial that Covid “could make past epidemics look tame by comparison.” In reality it is comparatively minor, as these things go, with a relatively low case fatality rate of around 1.5 percent in Canada. Thanks to strong public health measures, including a rapidly developed and deployed vaccine, it only accounts for around 5 percent of all deaths in the past 2 years of the pandemic.

This is not to diminish the deaths of millions of people globally, the sense of loss among the bereaved, or the mental, social and economic costs borne by billions. But we should be glad it was not the Black Death, which killed around 40 percent of the European population in just 4 years from 1347, or smallpox, with a death rate of around 30 percent before the use of vaccination.

And this was nothing compared to the disruption that Indigenous people in the Americas experienced when they encountered European diseases such as smallpox, influenza, measles and whooping cough. One estimate is that up to 90 percent of the pre-contact population of some 60 million Indigenous people in the Americas died within a century of contact due to a combination of infectious disease and colonial policies that amounted to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called a cultural genocide.

But Covid is not an existential crisis, it does not threaten societal collapse. More profoundly concerning, indeed critical, is what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres calls our “suicidal  war on nature” that we have been conducting for the past couple of centuries, and with increasing intensity since the mid-20^th century. Globally, the UN Secretary General and the UN Environment Program have begun to address the challenge of making peace with nature, focusing on the triple threat of climate change, loss of biodiversity and high levels of pollution.

In a September 2021 speech to the UN, Mr. Guterres linked the war on nature to several other global crises that together threaten “a future of serious instability and climate chaos.” In addition to Covid, these include “unchecked inequality [which is] is undermining social cohesion, creating fragilities that affect us all”, the “unforeseen consequences” of technology and a system of “global decision-making [that] is fixed on immediate gain, ignoring the long-term consequences of decisions — or indecision.” 

Climate change inaction, and the desecration of nature more generally, in the name of ‘progress’ is of course the poster child for such bad decisions. What is critical, it seems to me, is an understanding of our complete inter-connection with and dependence on the Earth’s natural systems for our very existence, coupled with a time horizon that extends beyond this financial year-end or this legislature’s term of office. We also need to pay more attention to the deep cultural values  that underlie and drive our dangerous social and economic behaviours.

So what I really want for 2022 is wider public discussion about the reality of the existential challenge of the multiple human-induced ecological crises that are conveniently referred to as the Anthropocene, and how we should respond here in the Greater Victoria Region.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

14 December 2021

Dr. Trevor Hancock

702 words

This evening I will gather with others in our neighbourhood at Lights on the Gorge, our annual event to mark the midwinter solstice. We will light some of the trees along Gorge Road, sing songs appropriate to midwinter and the solstice and have a lantern parade for the kids. It’s not a major event in itself, but it certainly marks a major event, a key turning point each year.

Its importance, for me, is not only that the sun has ceased its retreat and now the days start getting longer, although that is certainly part of it. But more than that, it is a way of connecting ourselves to nature and the great annual cycles that mark our year. 

My recent columns, as you will have seen, have been based around the theme of ceasing our war on nature and instead making peace with nature, as the UN Secretary General has urged. But as with all peace initiatives, this means coming to know your ‘enemy’ – and as the recent extreme weather events have shown, nature can at times seem like an enemy, even though these events are at least to some extent caused or exacerbated by humanity.

So getting to know and respect nature, to treat nature as an ally and partner, not a foe and competitior, begins with increasing our contact with nature. Recognising the winter and summer solstices is part of that process.

The solstice is also a time when my mind turns to other turning points. One of those has to do with the set of human-induced global ecological changes that we are witnessing, most obviously climate change. Unfortunately, the decision-making systems in our societies and economies are not set up to deal well with changes in complex dynamic systems such as ecosystems (and our societal systems, for that matter). We assume a degree of stability and slow, fairly smooth and linear change.

But that is not how complex systems change; they can both resist pressures and maintain stability and then, when the right trigger happens or the pressure becomes too much, they can flip quite suddenly to a new state. “Sometimes”, notes the recently-established Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University (I am on the Institute’s Science Advisory Board) “a small change in one component of a complex system causes an enormous shift in the system’s overall behavior; but other times, even large changes in multiple components produce little effect.”

The timing of non-linear change in a system, adds the Institute, is hard to predict, and such shifts to a new stable state “are usually extremely difficult to reverse”. That is a problem, because we face “the real possibility that . . . [our planetary socio-ecological] system is close to an irreversible shift to a new pathway that would radically degrade human well-being and civilization’s long-term prospects.” This is a turning point we really don’t want to bring about.

On the other hand, there are turning points we do want to trigger. As leading Earth scientist Will Steffen noted a couple of years ago, in contemplating the possibility of rapid and irreversible shifts in the planetary Earth systems that are our life support: “We need to reach a social tipping point, before we reach a planetary one.” It is not yet clear we have reached a social tipping point for climate change, but after the extreme weather events of 2021, we may be getting closer.

Societal systems also maintain stability in the face of pressures (which is one of the unstated purposes of a bureaucracy), but if they reach a tipping point they too can flip. We have seen this with respect to the shift in the social acceptability of smoking a few decades ago or the fairly sudden acceptance of gay marriage in many countries in recent years. Now we need some fairly rapid societal shifts with respect to our overall relationship with – and dependence upon – nature.

That is the central focus of the work of the Cascade Institute; to try to figure out how we might intervene to “produce a virtuous cascade of change that helps flip humanity onto a far more positive path”. So Happy Solstice, I wish all of us a positive turning point soon.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

7 December 2021

Dr. Trevor Hancock

701 words

We have just witnessed another Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an orgy of consumerism that kicks off the Christmas shopping binge. Every year it seems the consumption-fest gets worse, hyped by a marketplace that encourages greed and over-consumption because it desperately wants us to purchase more and more stuff.

But while this consumer-fest may seem to be good for the economy, it’s bad for the planet, as the retail market supercharges our environmental impact, and bad for us.

First there is the amount of materials that have to be mined, harvested or otherwise extracted to make the products and their packaging, as well as the pollutants created in those processes. Then there is all the energy used in manufacturing, distributing and delivering them, again with associated pollution, and finally the mountains of waste that result.

A 2018 CBC report noted several ways in which on-line shopping – which can have a lower carbon footprint than in-store shopping – can end up being worse: Selecting rush-shipping, over-ordering and doing product returns, doing international online shopping, and not having an alternate delivery option when you are not home, requiring re-delivery. The problem is that the system is set up to make these unsustainable choices easy.

Then there is the waste, including all the packaging waste. I have a classic example of this. Last year I was sent a thank-you gift by an organization in Ontario whose event I had spoken at (via Zoom). The gift, which was shipped from Vancouver, was a small green plant in a huge cardboard box. The thought was good, but the environmental impact was excessive.

But what makes all this even worse is that the materialistic values that underpin and drive consumerism make us feel worse, not better. In his 2002 book The High Price of Materialism, Tim Kasser, a psychology professor at Knox College, Illinois, showed that “materialistic values go hand in hand with low quality of life and psychological health”.

In a 2013 article, he and his co-authors noted there is “empirical evidence . . . that the more that people prioritized values and goals for money and possessions, relative to other aims in life, the lower they scored on outcomes such as life satisfaction, happiness, vitality, and self-actualization.” And a 2014 article that Kasser co-authored noted “a growing body of evidence suggests that materialistic values may be negatively associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.”

It seems we – and the planet upon which we depend – would be better off without Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So it is important to know that there is some good news. For example, an August 2020 report from the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations at Cardiff University found that during Covid there had been “reductions in waste, travel and consumption [and a] rise in low-carbon recreation such as virtual and outdoor exercise, gardening and creative hobbies”, although they expressed concern that with the lifting of lockdown there could be a return to pre-existing habits.

Closer to home, Teghan Acres, Communications Coordinator at Canada’s National Zero Waste Council, recently noted pioneering work in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal to use cargo electric bikes and electric vehicles to lower the environmental impact of online deliveries.

Even closer to home, she reported that several eco-conscious small businesses in Victoria launched Blue Friday in 2019. The stores pledge to donate a large portion of Black Friday sales to support ocean conservation initiatives. Of course, it is still about selling stuff, but at least it is local. The Blue Friday revenue in past years has helped purchase Seabins for North Saanich Marina and this year will replace the foam dock at First Street Marina in Tofino.

But beyond these small steps, important though they may be, we need a transformation in our core values away from materialism to other, more pro-health, pro-social and pro-planet values.  As the recent report from the UN Environment Program, ‘Making Peace with Nature’, noted: “With successful transformative change, the consumption of resources would decrease in wealthy contexts and increase sustainably elsewhere.” In such a future, we would not see the good life being “centred around high levels of material consumption, but around rich relationships involving people and nature.”

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

1 December 2021

Dr. Trevor Hancock

1 December 2021

701 words

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, has told us “humanity is waging war on nature.” The problem is that wars have winners and losers. But as the events this year have surely shown us, Mother Nature is more powerful than us, and bats last. We are going to lose this war, which is why Mr. Guterres added: “This is suicidal.”

We need to give up the belief that humanity is more powerful than nature, that we can manage and control and defeat nature. Instead, we need to understand that we have to work with and make peace with nature, as Mr. Guterres urges us to do. Because Mother Nature has been showing us that ‘business as usual’ is a recipe for disaster, one for which we seem almost entirely unprepared.

We have become the victims of a self-imposed ‘perfect storm’, which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “a critical or disastrous situation created by a powerful concurrence of factors”. Here in BC we have experienced the heat dome, disastrous forest fires and now horrendous floods. What drives all these events is climate change, to which BC is a significant contributor, combined with poor planning and bad practices that create vulnerable conditions.

What we have heard described as ‘atmospheric rivers’ are better described as vapor storms. In an article in the November edition of Scientific American, Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Centre notes that global warming leads to higher levels of water vapor in the air. This fuels “’vapor storms’  that are unleashing more rain and snow than storms did only a few decades ago.”

Then we have increased our vulnerability to fire and flood and storm over the decades of ‘business as usual’ practices, and compounded that by a failure to adequately take into account the changing climate. We drained Sumas Lake for farming, but then failed to protect and enhance the dykes that should protect it. We built on floodplains: An entire suburb of Vancouver is called Delta – surely that should tell us something – while a November 28^th article in the Times Colonist noted that 85 percent of the community of Pitt Meadows is built on floodplain.

We have clearcut forests as if there were no tomorrow, even though “clearcutting increases the frequency and intensity of forest fires” and also increases “the risk of flooding at peak periods” and “the likelihood of landslides”, according to a report prepared this year for the Sierra Club by Dr. Peter Wood, a forester with over 20 years experience in the area of forests and climate change in Canada and internationally.

We built the Coquihalla Highway very rapidly, just 18 months, ready for Expo 86, but are we now paying the penalty for a rushed job? Have we failed to improve and protect the highway in light of predicted climate changes?

None of the events of 2021 should have come as a surprise, although they clearly have. Previous heat events should have warned us of the potential health effects, yet 595 people died in the heat dome and Lytton burned to the ground. A 2015 report commissioned by the BC government found that the dike that protected the Sumas Prairie was “substandard,” “too low” and “need[ed] to be updated” and more generally that “none of the 74 dikes examined in the Lower Mainland fully met the province’s standards”, CBC News reported last week. On top of that, a report by Ebbwater Consultants earlier this year warned that “the current model for flood risk governance in B.C. is broken”, and yet governments were taken by surprise.

As environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk said on CBC’s The Fifth Estate on November 26^th: “For governments, experience has become making the same mistake over and over again, but with greater confidence.” 

What Mother Nature is telling us, fairly clearly, is that we can’t go on with business as usual. We have created climate change, and now we are beginning to see its implications. We have to change, we have to take all possible measures to slow and then halt human-induced climate change, and we have to learn to live with and adapt to the changes that are inevitably coming. We can’t keep on this way.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “Practising planetary health care in B.C. starts with hospital food waste)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 November 2021

701 words

It comes as a surprise to many people, including health care professionals, that the health care system has a large ecological footprint. But as I noted last week, if the global health care system were a country, then its carbon emissions would have made it the fifth-largest emitter on the planet, according to a 2019 report from Health Care Without Harm. 

But climate change caused by the health sector’s emissions results not only in environmental harm, but in harm to human health. And that is a direct contravention of one of the fundamental priciples of medicine, enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath, to do no harm; hence the need for health care without harm.

Of course, climate change is not the only environmental and health harm that the health care system creates. For example the Green Hospital Scorecard, a program of the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care (founded 20 years ago), is used by hospitals to assess their policies and actions on energy and water use, pollution prevention and waste management, transportation, healthy food systems and climate change, as well as corporate leadership.

So now that Canada has signed on at COP26 to the global commitment to create sustainable low-carbon health care systems, we have to look to the provinces, who actually run the health care system, to step up and take action across this wide range of issues.

Here in B.C. some steps are already underway. The province’s July 2021 Mandate Letters to the health authorities makes fighting climate change one of five foundational principles that will inform their policies and programs. In particular, they are expected to reduce their building emissions by 50 percent and their fleet emissions by 40 percent by 2030, as part of the CleanBC Plan. But B.C. will need to go much further to identify and tackle the full range of environmentally responsible health care practices that are needed.

So I was delighted to learn recently that UBC has established a Planetary Healthcare Lab led by Dr. Andrea MacNeill, a cancer surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital who is passionately committed to reducing health care’s environmental and health impacts. She also holds the newly established position of Medical Director of Planetary Health for Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH). The Lab is an interdisciplinary research collaborative dedicated to creating health systems that promote both human and planetary health.

In an April press release, UBC noted the Lab “will tackle everything from hospital food-related pollution and unnecessary patient testing and treatment through to emissions stemming from the medical supply chain.” Over time, the Lab states, this will involve “embedding planetary healthcare in health system structures (e.g. hospital accreditation, quality reporting, supply chain)”, so it becomes just part of everyday practice.

One key area the Lab will be looking at is the health system’s food services, which account for a large part of the sector’s footprint and generate a lot of food waste, as is the case at the household level. A more ecologically sustainable diet will also have significant direct health benefits for patients and staff. Another area is the supply chain, which accounts for around 80 percent of health care’s carbon emissions. Requiring a ‘circular economy’ approach be adopted throughout the supply chain could thus substantially reduce the consumption and depletion of natural resources, as well as reducing emissions, waste and pollution. The Lab will also examine the environmental and health benefits of  ‘virtual care’, which already saves millions of kilometres of patient travel each year.

The new Planetary Health initiative at VCH is complemented by the work of VCH’s Energy and Environmental Sustainability team, which among other things works on active & clean transportation and minimizing energy and water consumption, carbon emissions, waste generation and toxic chemicals use. Then there is GreenCare, which unites efforts across the four Lower Mainland health organizations (VCH, Fraser Health, Providence Health and the Provincial Health Services Authority). Their 2020 Environmental Performance Dashboard highlights significant reductions in the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions, water use and waste generation across the four health authorities.

It’s a good start, now we need this to become provincial in scope, with Planetary Health Offices at the provincial level as well as in all the health authorities.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

17 November 2021

Dr. Trevor Hancock

697 words

Last week I reported on the rally at the BC Legislature organised by Doctors for Planetary Health – West Coast. The rally was timed to coincide with the COP26, the UN’s climate change conference in Glasgow, where for the first time – and at the behest of the UK government – health was one of three science priority areas.

The World Health Organization (WHO) was at the centre of this work, offering an extensive set of events and initiatives. This included the release of an open letter signed by 600 organizations representing 46 million health professionals that identified the climate crisis as the single biggest health threat humanity faces; a Global Conference on Health and Climate Change; and the release of a WHO report on the health argument for climate action.

This report recognised, in the words of Dr. Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, that in the face of climate change “protecting health requires action well beyond the health sector, in energy, transport, nature, food systems, finance and more.” But it also requires action by the health sector itself, which is a significant contributor to climate change, and more broadly to ecological harm.

When it comes to climate change, Health Care Without Harm – the leading international organisation focused on making health care ecologically sustainable, and a co-lead with WHO on its global initiative, estimated in a 2019 report that “Health care’s climate footprint is equivalent to 4.4% of global net emissions” of greenhouse gases. If it were a country, the report noted, the health sector “would be the fifth-largest emitter on the planet.”

Canada’s health care system, noted the 2019 Lancet Countdown report for Canada, has the third highest greenhouse gas emissions per person in the world, compared to 47 other countries where data was available. It also emits large amounts of other air and water pollutants, consumes considerable quantities of materials (especially because of its widespread use of disposables) and as a result generates large volumes of waste, including toxic waste. But those are just the direct emissions.

When we consider that healthcare is one of the largest economic sectors in Canada (almost 13 percent of GDP, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information), employs around the same proportion of the labour force and generates millions of kilometres of travel by staff, patients and suppliers, it is clear the system’s impact is even larger.

So it is exciting to hear that the WHO announced that the governments of 50 countries had signed on to a commitment to develop climate-resilient and low-carbon health systems. Despite missing the original deadline, Canada did indeed sign on before the end of COP26, after being pressured by Canadian planetary health advocates in Glasgow and their colleagues across Canada. Thus Canada has agreed to conduct climate change and health vulnerability assessments and to develop national adaptation plans for health.

It has also agreed to develop an action plan or roadmap to achieve sustainable, low carbon health systems. Regretttably, however, Canada did not join 14 other countries, including Belgium, Spain and the UK, in committing to creating a net-zero emissions health care system.

The UK provides a useful example. In early 2020 the CEO of the National Health Service (NHS) commissioned a plan for the system to become “the world’s first ‘net zero’ national health service”, a plan they stuck to in spite of Covid. Launched in October 2020, the plan has two clear targets: For the emissions the NHS controls directly, achieve net zero by 2040, and for the emissions the system can influence, achieve net zero by 2045.

The latter emissions include “Indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy, mostly electricity . . . and  . . . all other indirect emissions that occur in producing and transporting goods and services, including the full supply chain.” Achieving this by 2045 is ambitious.

Canada’s failure to sign on to a net-zero target is perhaps understandable. After all, health care is a provincial responsibility and not under federal control. So now we have to get our provincial governments to develop climate-resilient and low-carbon health systems and to achieve net-zero health care systems.

That will be the focus of next week’s column.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

9 November 2021

Dr. Trevor Hancock

700 words

In 1848, Dr. Rudolf Virchow presented his report to the Prussian government on the steps needed to address a typhus outbreak in Upper Silesia – an impoverished, largely Polish-speaking coal-mining area. To the surprise and consternation of the government, he called for a variety of social and economic reforms, including democratic self-government, making Polish an official language, separation of church and state, and the creation of grassroots agricultural cooperatives.

‘But Dr Virchow’, they said, ‘this is not a medical report, it’s a political report!’. To which he famously replied, “Gentlemen, medicine is a social science, and politics nothing else but medicine writ large.” His statement has been an inspirational force for public health action ever since, providing the rationale for the focus public health so often has on the hugely important health impacts of public policy beyond the health sector.

173 years later, Virchow’s spirit is alive and well and was on display at the BC Legislature on November 4^th. Doctors for Planetary Health – West Coast brought together some 100 doctors, nurses and other health professionals for a rally at the BC Legislature, timed to coincide with the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the organizing group, helped formulate the set of demands presented at the rally and write the background document, and spoke at the rally.)

Inspired in part by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who had called the latest IPCC report on climate change a ‘Code Red for humanity’, we were there to declare a climate and ecological ‘Code Red’ for BC, noting: “The climate and ecological crisis is a health crisis. We stand in solidarity for a safe and equitable future for all living creatures and the planet.”

We were also motivated by an unprecedented editorial published in September in more than 200 leading medical journals that stated bluntly: “the greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the amount of global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore nature.”

As was the case for Virchow all those years before, the focus of the action agenda we want the BC government to undertake is rooted in the recognition that politics is nothing else but health and wellbeing on a large scale. So in addition to asking the government to declare a climate and ecological emergency, we called for an emergency plan leading to transformative change that would improve the health and wellbeing of the people of BC – and the world beyond.

On the climate change front, we called not only for an end to fossil fuel supports, but the phasing out of fossil fuel production and exports. In addition, we called for an assessment of the health impacts of all energy use in BC and investment in a regenerative zero-emissions economy.

Recognising, as does the UN, that we also face both biodiversity loss and pollution crises, we called for the protection and restoration of nature. In particular, this means protecting natural ecosystems such as old growth forests, enacting a Species at Risk Act and recognizing the human right to a healthy environment, as well as the rights of nature.

Even more broadly, we called on the BC government to put human wellbeing in balance with nature at the heart of decision-making. This includes replacing the GDP as a measure of progress with an alternative such as the Genuine Progress Indicator and creating a Wellbeing budget, enacting a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and establishing the role of a Commissioner for Future Generations. These are all steps that similar-sized jurisdictions such as Aotearoa New Zealand and Wales have taken.

Finally, recognizing that we must protect and improve the health of the most disadvantaged and least healthy groups in society, as well as those who will be most affected by the shift to a more healthy and sustainable society, we called for a Just Transition. It is important, we emphasized, that any action on these ecological crises be undertaken in conjunction with BC’s First Nations and Indigenous people, with a particular focus on addressing social and ecological injustice in BC and around the world.

I like to think Rudolf Virchow would have been proud of us.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Published as “Becoming a One Planet region starts with food

Dr. Trevor Hancock

2 November 2021

700 words

Last week I noted that Saanich – which has an ecological footprint of around 3-4 planets – has taken the first step to becoming a One Planet municipality by adopting a resolution to that effect; staff will report back on next steps. But while Saanich is almost 30 percent of the Greater Victoria Region, that still leaves 12 other municipalities, the CRD and more than 70 percent of the population to follow suit.

The good news is that most if not all of our local municipalities have declared a climate emergency and created a climate action plan, as has the CRD. Since carbon emissions are an important part of the ecological footprint of the region – about 60 percent in Saanich, which is likely the same for the whole region – this is an important start. But our footprint also includes the land and water area we need to provide food and resources such as timber and minerals, to build our communities and their supporting infrastucture and to dispose of wastes.

Moreover, the ecological footprint is an underestimate of our full impact, since it does not include the impacts of many pollutants, especially the persistent organic pollutants we have created that permeate our food chains. Nor does it include species extinctions and the loss of biodiversity. And yet, as the UN has noted, we face a triple ecological crisis: Climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

So becoming a One Planet Region – one with a footprint equivalent to our fair share of the Earth’s biocapacity and resources – means addressing this triple crisis while reducing our footprint around 65 – 75 percent. What would that mean and how would it be achieved?

First, we need to recognise the scale of the problem. So we need to measure the ecological footprint of the Greater Victoria Region as well as the level of locally generated pollution and local biodiversity loss. More challengingly, this must include pollution and biodiversity loss elsewhere in the world created in both in the production of the resources we then import and use and the damage from any wastes we export.

This is quite similar to the appraoch needed to undertake the ecological assessment of the Region in a Doughnut Economics city portrait (see my column “True prosperity is doughnut-shaped,” 31 January 2021, and related columns on 7 and 14 March 2021) so we might be able to achieve both together.

Then we need the CRD and all the other municipalities to adopt a One Planet strategy or action plan, as they have done for the climate emergency. Fortunately, the team of Dr. Jennie Moore at the BC Institute of Technology and Cora Hallsworth that assessed Saanich’s ecological footprint in 2018 also identified some key actions to reduce the footprint.

They identfied four broad areas of work: Food (49 percent of Saanich’s footprint), transportation (27 percent), buildings (15 percent), and consumable products and wastes (9 percent). Of these, municipal governments have a fair degree of control over transportation, buildings and waste management, but much less control over the food and agricultural systems and the production, sale and purchasing of consumables. Clearly, becoming a One Planet Region also needs the engagement and support of the citizenry as a whole, the private sector and higher levels of government.

Moore and Hallsworth suggested a number of specific actions that we need to undertake. The two with the greatest benefit in terms of reducing our ecological footprint are related to food. Since more than 70 percent of the food footprint is due to animal-based foods – meat, fish, eggs and dairy – they recommend we should reduce beef and dairy consumption by 50 percent (substituting chicken for the beef) and reduce post-purchase food waste by 25 percent – both being a task for households and the retail and food services industries.

The next largest benefits come from converting half the private vehicle fleet to electric power, reducing the number of kilometers travelled in private vehicles by one quarter, eliminating heating oil and reducing natural gas and propane consumption by two-thirds.

In a future column in this series, I will explore specifically what our local governments can do in these areas to help us become a One Planet Region.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

26 October 2021

Dr. Trevor Hancock

701 words

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated almost a year ago “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere.” In my view, this can only happen if we recognize, as Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos’ 1972 book put it, that there is ‘Only One Earth’ and we have to learn to live within and not beyond its bounds.

We are a long way from that. According to the Global Footprint Network our ecological footprint, globally, was 1.7 planets in 2017, with 61 percent of that due to carbon emissions. Here in Canada, it was 5 planets, of which almost 65 percent was due to our carbon emissions – and that ignores the emissions from Canada’s exported fossil fuels. So to become a One Planet Canada, we need to reduce our ecological footprint by 80 percent – and we have to do so quite rapidly.

In this region our footprint is a bit less, according to the footprint of both Saanich and Victoria as calculated by Dr. Jennie Moore at the B.C. Institute of Technology and Victoria-based environmental consultant Cora Hallsworth. (This is largely because 90 percent of our electricity is from hydro, not fossil fuels, and we have a more temperate climate year-round than most of Canada). Nonetheless, with a footprint of around 3 – 4 planets, we still need to reduce it by 65 – 75 percent, a massive task that should be “the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere” in the Region. 

In fact Saanich – which we tend to forget is the largest municipality by population in the region – has been hosting and supporting a One Planet Saanich initiative since 2018 and Mayor Fred Haynes has been an enthusiastic supporter. The initiative came to Saanich from a UK-based organization, Bioregional, as part of a small international project.

Coordinated by Cora Hallsworth (with Vancouver-based non-profit OneEarth) and funding first from Bioregional and now from Vancity Credit Union and the District of Saanich, the project engages local community organisations, schools and businesses in developing their own One Planet Action Plans and reporting on their progress in reducing their ecological footprint. You can find a number of their plans published in the Stakeholders page on the One Planet Saanich website.

But Saanich itself does not yet have an overarching strategy to become a One Planet municipality, although it does use the One Planet framework as a ‘lens’ within its Climate Action Plan. In addition it is now developing a Resilient Saanich initiative (an environmental policy framework that will integrate sustainability and the natural environment) and has other relevant initiatives such as its Active Transportation Plan.

So I was glad to see Saanich Council, on October 18^th, become the first municipality in the Region – and as far as I know, the first in BC and indeed in Canada – to start down the path to becoming a One Planet municipality. This followed a presentation I made earlier in the summer to the Council’s Healthy Saanich Advisory Committee, in my capacity as founder and President of Conversations for a One Planet Region. The Committee adopted a resolution asking Council to develop a One Planet Action Plan. Council adopted the resolution and referred it to staff to report back on next steps.

One way forward would be to create a One Planet Strategy to embed the ten One Planet principles into all other plans and strategies at the municipality. Saanich could then report its progress using the same One Planet metrics that are currently being developed to create a standard reporting framework for all the One Planet Saanich stakeholders.

What makes these One Planet principles particularly interesting is that they are focused first on people and community. In fact the first three principles are about health and happiness, equity and local economy, and community and culture. Only then do the principles address the ‘usual suspects’ of environmental sustainability, including of course both zero waste and zero-carbon energy.

Saanich is the regional and indeed provincial leader in heeding Mr. Guterres’ call to make peace with nature. Now we just need the rest of the region to get on the same page; more on that next week.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as ‘Sadly, B.C. is still treating nature as resource to be exploited”)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

19 October 2021

701 words

In this series of columns I am exploring the UN’s call for humanity to make peace with nature. Last week I noted that B.C.’s government is failing to act, or is taking inadequate action, on climate change. This week, I look at B.C.’s continuing war on nature, focusing on the second of three global ecological crises noted in the UN report – biodiversity loss.  But I also look at its failure to address the wider economic, social and other transformations needed if we are to make peace with nature.

In a May 2021 biodiversity report card, Ecojustice and the Wilderness Committee described B.C. as “a ‘poster child’ for the biodiversity crisis — it has the richest biodiversity in Canada, but also the highest number of species at risk.” In fact, the B.C. government’s 2021 update to its Red and Blue List found 782 ecological communities, native species and subspecies in B.C. are at the greatest risk of being lost (Red List) and a further 1,141 on the Blue List that are ‘of special concern’ (vulnerable).

Yet the government reneged on John Horgan’s 2017 commitment to bring in a Species At Risk Act. As a result, B.C. is “one of the few remaining provinces without a stand-alone law to protect at-risk species and the habitat they need to survive and recover”, the biodiversity report card notes. This was one of the four out of five areas considered in the report where B.C. earned an ‘F’ grade.

And then, of course, we have the B.C. government’s failure to implement the recommendations of the Old-growth Strategic Review and put in place a moratorium on the cutting of the tiny fraction – about 3 percent, according to a May 2021 report from three independent forest management experts – of the high-quality old growth big tree forests in B.C.

Also in May, the Wilderness Committee released a report based on publicly available data showing a 43 percent increase in cutblock approvals in the year following the government’s receipt of the Old-growth Strategic Review. Moreover, “eighty per cent of this logging was concentrated in the medium and higher productivity forests.”

In an article on the old-growth issue in The Tyee in June, Michael M’Gonigle – who among other things held the eco-research chair in environmental law and policy at UVic –was blunt: “Horgan’s government of New Democrats shows no will to take up the struggle. It is incredible that, as biodiversity collapses globally and locally, no substantive discussion exists of what a transformation away from [the] inherited political economy might look like.”

The inherited political economy he refers to is rooted in a 19^th and 20^th century worldview, an industrial society and economy that treats nature and people as a resource to be exploited in the pursuit of continued economic growth. I agree with M’Gonigle that the fundamental problem is that the NDP, like the Liberals and Conservatives to its right, is still rooted in this worldview. From that perspective, what matters is jobs and money – and votes – today, with no sense of long-term responsibility. The only real difference between the parties is about how equitably the spoils and the power are divided.

But the UN Environment Programme is very clear, in its February 2021 report ‘Making Peace with Nature’, that “economic and financial systems can and should be transformed”. Specifically, the report suggests ditching GDP, noting that “Yardsticks such as inclusive wealth (the sum of produced, natural, human and social capital) provide a better basis for investment decisions.”

This is another example of where the NDP could and should have led in the shift to making peace with rather than war on nature – and failed to do so. Its formal agreement with the Green Party in 2017 set up a workgroup to look at developing an alternative to GDP for B.C., but the whole project seems to have been shunted aside and made to disappear into the bureaucracy – no report has emerged, so no significant changes were required and no old thought patterns were harmed.

Clearly we can’t look to B.C.’s government for action on making peace with nature. So in future columns I will look at what ‘making peace with nature’ might mean here in the Greater Victoria Region.

© Trevor Hancock, 2021

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy