The study, one of the most comprehensive reports ever undertaken on pollution and its costs in Canada, is based on a review of published international research that attempts to break down how pollution impacts society. IISD associates and report authors Robert Smith and Kieran McDougal estimate that consequences for lost human health and well-being alone top $39 billion annually; smog impacts reached $36 billion in 2015.

“Though we were not able to fully answer the question ‘What is the cost of pollution in Canada?’,” the authors wrote, “we nonetheless found solid evidence that pollution imposes significant costs on Canadians.”

This is in part because pollution undermines entire systems of resource production, the report warned. Fishing grounds deteriorate when lakes become infested with algae while forests become less productive when drenched in acid rain. Smith and McDougal conclude that trillions of dollars’ worth of economic and resource assets remain at risk from pollution.

While the effects of some pollutants like PM2.5 in urban smog are well known, significant data gaps remain for other disturbances. To better understand how pollution costs Canadians, the authors suggest, further research is needed on the economic and environmental impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, heavy metals from contaminated mine sites and agricultural runoff. Phosphorus pollution causing algal blooms in Lake Erie alone has reduced the lake’s tourism value by $4 billion; shoreline properties by another $700 million.

“These costs are real and will be borne by Canadian families, businesses and governments into the future,” said IISD president and CEO Scott Vaughan. “The impacts of pollution are too great to allow poor data to stop us from taking action.”

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After more than two hours of semi-final presentations for the de Gaspé Beaubien Foundation’s AquaHacking Challenge, a panel of judges was determining which five teams will advance to September’s finals. The judges have been deliberating for 30 minutes. Until they’re done, there’s nothing anxious hackers can do but eat and drink.

The hackathon format is new for the family-run de Gaspé Beaubien Foundation. Founded in 1990, the organization has typically guided its philanthropic largesse towards supporting family businesses and improving health resources – assistance that often takes the form of partnerships and investment. But when a younger generation of the family suggested the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River region wasn’t as water secure as their ancestors thought, the foundation turned its attention to water issues plaguing the basin.

“We talk about problems all the time, but we want to focus on solutions,” says Claude Perras, executive director of the de Gaspé Beaubien Foundation. Rather than assume they or institutional experts knew best how to tackle worries facing the watershed, the hackathon format opened the field to a variety of international players from across disciplines.

“It becomes playful,” Perras says: “It’s a game, and people like to compete.” But be sure to lose any Silicon Valley-esque, Red Bull-chugging and late night pizza-scarfing image you may have of hackathons. Given the seriousness of the problems the teams were being asked to tackle, packing plans into 24-hour cram sessions didn’t make sense. Instead, the foundation staggered the competition over 10 months, allowing teams to meet, reformulate plans, work with Southern Ontario-based incubators like LaunchPad and Velocity, and polish their pitches.

After the 2015 and 2016 AquaHacking Challenges focused on issues facing the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers, the organization shifted focus in 2017 to the most vulnerable Great Lake – Lake Erie. Prospective teams of hackers were told to focus their solution on one of five broad categories: invasive species, algal blooms, citizen science, plastic microbeads or what they dubbed “Spreading #LakeErieLove.”

Thirty-two teams answered the call. Most came from Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City, but a small number registered from Chicago and one even signed on from the Netherlands. “The best teams are always multi-disciplinary,” Perras says. “You have engineers, water experts, you could [even] have a social scientist. The whole idea is that you need to develop solutions beneficial to society – and at the same time create a potential start-up.”

Far from generating theoretical solutions, the AquaHacking Challenge is premised on transitioning effective and scalable ideas into the real world. Finalists share $75,000 in prizes from the de Gaspé Beaubien Foundation and its partners in the form of cash, incubator workspace and pro bono legal and business services. The ultimate winner also receives one-on-one time with venture capitalists familiar with water technologies.

Forming businesses from hackathon ideas is no empty promise. Since winning the inaugural challenge in 2015, Kat Kavanagh’s citizen science project, Water Rangers, has connected conservation authorities and lake associations with real-time water data like pH and dissolved oxygen levels. “As a web designer I saw this great opportunity to create something that connected everyday people who care about lakes and rivers with technology that might help them understand the issues affecting their water,” Kavanagh says.

Water Rangers has found partners for its app-based platform in Alabama and Florida, but its focus remains on the Ottawa Valley and western Quebec where Ottawa Riverkeeper (a partner in the 2015 AquaHacking Challenge) has been instrumental in connecting Kavanagh’s business with partners and potential investors.

The games begin

Before shuffling into the auditorium at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, the teams stood in clusters around high tables, poring over notes and fiddling with lanyards. Some participants paced around fountains in the outdoor foyer. One man sat alone in the sun, eyes closed and hands clasped in his lap as if in silent meditation. Lights flickered, telling everyone to find a seat in the darkened theatre. The presentations were about to begin.

Ideas presented ranged from practical to doe-eyed and back again. Gamification was an early favourite of many who aimed, Pokémon GO-style, to connect people with local Erie landmarks while collecting digital tchotchkes. These teams seemed unaware of just how spatially massive Lake Erie is. Others focused on enhancing citizen science, part of a broad approach that numerous teams embraced to collect user data affecting things like beach closures.

The panel, including judges from The Water Institute, WaterTAP Ontario and Velocity, among others, ultimately selected five teams that went straight to the source in tackling Lake Erie’s woes. ImPONDerable is developing a kit to help Erie residents detect unsafe water conditions, while eMagin is proposing to work with wastewater utilities to reduce untreated sewage spilling from combined sewer overflows directly into the watershed. SIM Labs is constructing hardware to classify and enumerate cyanobacteria, a form of bacteria found in algal blooms that can carry lethal toxins. PolyGone, meanwhile, was making a device to capture 90 per cent of plastic microfibres shed from fleece clothing in household washing machines.

The fifth team, Fertilizer Burn, is manufacturing a device that assists farmers in determining how much fertilizer is present in their soil, with the aim of reducing the volume of nitrogen and phosphorus, two leading causes of algal blooms, applied to their fields. “Our goal,” Fertilizer Burn’s Rebecca Swabey told the crowd, “is a soil lab for every farmer.”

Few believe the solutions proposed at the AquaHacking Challenge will revolutionize how society tackles multi-dimensional (and multi-generational) problems facing Lake Erie. Algal blooms alone have been Erie’s summertime scourge since the 1970s. Without radical alterations to agricultural practices, blooms are unlikely to cease – with or without citizen data.

“We shouldn’t kid ourselves that [the solutions proposed] are going to solve all the problems” facing Lake Erie, says Kevin Boehmer, managing director of the University of Waterloo’s The Water Institute, noting that “complex problems need complex solutions.” But many hackers brought together by the de Gaspé Beaubien Foundation will propose solutions that stand on their own.

“Hackathon participants are committed – it’s almost like a benevolent cult,” Boehmer says, a format bringing people “committed, enthusiastic and passionate about the technology side” to contemplate, in new ways, the water problems facing the 40-million-plus people living in the basin.

With the winner announced in Waterloo on September 13 (SIM Labs), the de Gaspé Beaubien Foundation will now turn its attention to the next AquaHacking Challenge for Lake Ontario in 2018, followed by a binational challenge that may take place in Chicago in 2019.

It’s all part of a plan to engage the next generation of clean water advocates, those not beholden to old solutions or outdated ways of thinking, says Claude Perras. As they grow the movement to find solutions to our water problems, the goal is to allow youth, students and water researchers to begin expressing their ideas for improving local watersheds in language that everyone understands.

“You convert them,” he says, into “water ambassadors and water entrepreneurs.”

The post Hacking the watershed appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Representing over $2.8 trillion (U.S.) in GDP, the initiative from Connecticut, Maine, Delaware, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Maryland, Rhode Island and Massachusetts constitutes a sweeping bipartisan commitment at the state level to curb climate changing emissions. And as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to tear down the previous administration’s climate policies, many are looking to cities, states and coalitions like this to pick up the slack.

Known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the organization vowed to reduce GHGs from power plants by 40 per cent from 2009 levels, the year the coalition was formed. With the announcement that an additional 30 per cent cut will be implemented in the coming decade, the RGGI has agreed to one of the most ambitious plans put before the group.

Under the latest proposal, the RGGI will cap emissions at 75.1 million tonnes of CO2 in 2021, gradually lowering the cap by 2.275 million tonnes annually until 2030.

Via carbon offset credits bought and sold by power companies, the RGGI’s efforts have overseen a drop in electricity prices of 3.4 per cent on average throughout the region. The coalition has raised more than $2.7 billion since its inception, money that’s been invested in energy efficiency, renewable energy projects and helping low-income families pay their electricity bills. All this while reducing ground-level air pollution worth an estimated $5.7 billion in public health benefits.

The plan is working. A recent analysis from the Acadia Center found that carbon dioxide emissions from the nine northeastern states had plummeted to just under 80 million tonnes since 2008, an overall reduction of 40 per cent.

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A recent study from PwC on CEO success found that forced turnovers of chief executives due to ethical lapses rose by 36 per cent in the period 2012-2016 over 2007-2011. The sharpest increases came from BRIC nations, Western Europe, Canada and the United States. Within those groups, long-serving CEOs and those heading larger companies were at greatest risk.

“In the late 20th century, even the most serious, large scale, and widely publicized cases of corporate misbehaviour rarely led to dismissal of the CEO,” wrote PwC staff Kristin Rivera and Per-Ola Karlsson in Strategy& this summer. Financial penalties were low and media attention was limited.

Today, CEOs ensnarled in major conflicts are often fired abruptly by boards of directors while facing skyrocketing penalties and the ceaseless gaze of news and social media.

Rather than suggesting CEOs are behaving more unethically today than in the past, Rivera and Karlsson argue that many global companies are pushing into markets where the risks of corruption and poor government oversight are higher. The 24/7 news cycle and the rise of social media, meanwhile, have made it easier for a public already suspicious of CEO honesty to identify corporate wrongdoing and demand that companies take action.

Yet a rise in the number of CEOs fired for ethical breaches may, in a perverse way, help boost low public perception of corporate morality over time, Rivera and Karlsson noted. Building integrity into the business ecosystem is essential, but punishing bad apples may demonstrate to the public that unacceptable behaviour from a minority of CEOs hasn’t spoiled the barrel.

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On the chopping block is everything from television, print and online advertising to product labelling and in-store displays for cereals, granola bars, chips and energy drinks.

While Quebec has had a similar ban in place since 1980 covering advertising to children under age 13, the proposed national ban is the first of its kind in Canada. Similar bans exist at various age thresholds in the U.K., Ireland, Norway and Sweden, among others.

Hasan Hutchinson, director general at Health Canada, said the agency is considering implementing a ban to cover children up to and including age 16 because older teenagers are equally impressionable. They are also beginning to make lifestyle decisions independent of their parents.

Conservative Senator Nancy Greene Raine introduced a private member’s bill in late 2016 suggesting the Quebec ban be introduced nationally. At committee hearings this summer, Greene Raine said she hopes to broaden the ban to capture marketing towards older teens.

“Some products that are being marketed to teenagers are, in my mind, very harmful,” Greene Raine said, especially highly caffeinated energy drinks. In April, a South Carolina teen died from a “caffeine-induced cardiac event” after it was revealed he quickly consumed hundreds of milligrams of caffeine from coffee, soda and energy drinks.

The Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA) calls the government proposal nothing less than a “complete ban on all food and beverage advertising” in the country. ACA president Ron Lund also disputes the link between food advertising and unhealthy eating.

Yet health advocates claim pressure is mounting on the government to take concrete steps to improve children’s health, beginning with the advertising ban. In Quebec, junk food consumption among youth is 13 per cent lower than in Ontario, said Jan Hux, chief science officer at Diabetes Canada. “We know that Quebec has successfully implemented this,” she said.

Health Canada concluded public consultations on the proposed ad ban in August, although some form of further consultation is expected in 2018.

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Within days, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry were mobilized to root out other Asian carp. Four weeks later, five more mature grass carp were caught at a Toronto islands marina. It left McDonald and her colleagues wondering – had the invasion of the destructive Asian carp in the Great Lakes finally begun?

Grass carp (which, along with silver, bighead and black carp are known as Asian carp) were first imported to America in 1963 on a recommendation from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. It was hoped that grass carp, a voracious plant-eater, would consume vegetation clogging irrigation canals and ponds used in the South’s burgeoning aquaculture industry. Silvers and bigheads followed in the early 1970s, put to work cleaning sewage lagoons in counties unable to afford more technologically sophisticated sewage treatments. Lastly, black carp were imported in the 1980s to eat disease-carrying snails that were killing pond-raised catfish.

The first grass carp were found in the wild in 1966, their escape facilitated by lax biosecurity standards and hubris regarding their ecological impacts. Over several decades, silvers and bigheads (the two species most worrisome to the Great Lakes today) swam north through the Mississippi watershed. The Illinois River connects them to Lake Michigan. Silvers and bigheads are now 122 kilometres from Chicago, kept back by a $9 million electric fence that barge captains decry as a safety hazard and biologists fear can’t adequately repel Asian carp.

At the heart of fears over Asian carp in the Great Lakes is a deep anxiety over what impact the voracious filter-feeding silver and bighead carps will inflict on native fishes. They consume vast quantities of phyto- and zooplankton, which form the base of the aquatic foodweb. Researchers worry the addition of countless Asian carp to the Great Lakes will reduce food supplies for species like rainbow smelt; as populations of prey species such as the smelt decline for lack of food, higher-level predators like lake trout and coho salmon that rely on prey fish will dwindle.

Biologists also fear for Ontario’s wetlands. Grass carp are capable of dramatically weakening wetlands by reducing reeds and grasses integral to shoreline stability. Ontario’s coastal wetlands are also a vital nursery for more than half the fish found in the Great Lakes.

University of Toronto conservation biologist Nick Mandrak was part of a team that recently assessed grass carp’s anticipated impacts in the basin. The complete findings, which were released in late 2015, aren’t good. Ontario has already lost 70 per cent of its historic wetlands due to urbanization, agricultural expansion and the effects of other invasive species like common carp. “When [grass carp] are stocked at very high densities they can completely remove all of the vegetation in a pond,” Mandrak said. If they reach those densities in the Great Lakes they could “severely decimate” coastal wetlands throughout Ontario.

In response, DFO built a $400,000 Asian carp research lab at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Ontario, in 2014. The lab emerged from $17.5 million in funding from Ottawa to fight Asian carp first announced in 2012, and has complemented the department’s strong monitoring efforts in the Great Lakes’ tributary rivers. Along with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, DFO has conducted field exercises with state and federal resource agencies in the American Midwest to swap best practices for stymieing carp.

Last year, Quebec joined Ontario and the federal government in becoming a member of the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee (ACRCC). This American federal agency overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency directs money towards better management and control of Asian carp. In 2015, the ACRCC allocated more than $74 million (U.S.) towards 43 projects throughout the Great Lakes basin. Canadian officials also participate in the Great Lakes Commission, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative and a host of other working groups and committees tackling the carp crisis.

In November, McDonald learned the grass carp captured on Toronto’s shore were hatchery born. “Good news on the invasive front,” she said. Knowing the fish weren’t born in the wild gives TRCA and the government breathing room to formulate a management strategy knowing – as much as they can ever know what’s going on beneath the water – that Ontario has yet to witness a full-blown invasion of Asian carp.

Still, McDonald isn’t taking any chances. The 9.3-hectare wetland construction project she’s overseeing will enhance fish, bird and amphibian habitat on the city’s lakefront; it’s an ideal natural environment for Asian carp. Yet regardless of where the captured grass carp originated, McDonald’s wetland will contain gates to keep invasive fish out.

Just in case more grass carp are lurking nearby.

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