With Earth Day just around the corner, it's time to celebrate this year's campaign: E nvironmental and Climate Literacy. 

Education is the foundation for progress. We need to build a global citizenry fluent in the concepts of climate change and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet. We need to empower everyone with the knowledge to inspire action in defense of environmental protection. earthday.org.

#noplacelikehome
To celebrate our beautiful planet, NASA invited people to submit pictures of their favourite place on Earth - compiled in this beautiful, four-minute video. 

Resources

Check out Earth Day Canada, and how you can get involved. Click here for toolkits, resources, and ideas to promote Earth Day at your facility, or check out UHN's Earth Week events!

Atmospheric CO₂ levels accelerate upwards, smashing records.  Every major nation in the world has agreed that climate change must be limited to a maximum of +2°C in global warming. Beyond that point, we risk destabilizing droughts, floods, mega-storms, heat waves, food shortages, and climate extremes. The best climate science says that staying below +2°C means we can't exceed 450 ppm of CO₂.

Despite decades of global efforts towards climate policies, clean energy and efficiency, CO₂ levels continue to rise and are actually accelerating upwards, according to the  newest CO2 data released by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Moreover, Canadian  CO₂ extraction is playing an oversized role.
Read more. 

Medical Community Gathers Steam to Tackle Climate’s Health Effects. Nearly 30 years ago, Alexander Leaf, MD, drew a bold analogy. " Changes brewing in climate and the environment may be just as harmful to human health as nuclear war," he wrote. Leaf passed away in 2013, but his message has flourished. In the 1990s, his essay  Potential Health Effects of Global Climatic and Environmental Changes spurred development of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. Some medical schools now offer courses in climate and health, and additional education programs are cropping up for practicing physicians. Read more.

Climate Change Best Practices: Resiliency Profiles

The Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care is excited to share our newest Climate Change Resiliency Profiles, featuring Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. These two case studies join six others that profile real climate-change related events and how health care facilities have responded. Read the other resiliency Profiles here.

Less Meat, More Options, Better Health. With the science clear on the impending public health impact of climate change and the absence of national policies to protect us from further progression, hospitals and health professionals are using the tools they have at their disposal to protect our future.

In particular, hospitals are removing meat, particularly meat raised conventionally, from the centre of the plate or off it entirely. A new report released by Health Care Without Harm,  Redefining Protein: Adjusting Diets to Protect Public Health and Conserve Resources, distills current research to reveal the human, environmental, and social impacts of the production of high-protein foods other than meat to arm hospitals with key information to design the healthiest plate. Read more. 

Dramatic Increase in Levels of Toxic Flame Retardant Among Americans.  Chlorinated organophosphate flame retardants (CIOPFRs) are among the most commonly detected flame retardants in furniture and electronics. Since they are not chemically bound to products, they migrate into indoor air and dust, where they can be inhaled or ingested. Unfortunately, although CIOPFRs were introduced as an alternative to the previous family of health harming PBDE flame retardants, they have also been linked to negative health outcomes such as  cancer and  neurodevelopmental damage. A group of researchers led by Duke University recently  conducted a review of 14 previous studies to look at trends in levels of flame retardant metabolite levels in the urine of subjects. They found that between 2002 and 2015, levels of chlorinated Tris (TDCIPP) metabolites increased fifteenfold among adults, and by a factor of four among children between 2010 and 2015. Read more.