Toxic blooms are often caused by overloads of synthetic fertilizers that were intended to nourish crops but end up being carried into waterways. Those farm inputs may have been considered suitable in an environment that’s constant but the shifting climate (including heavier rainfall and warming waters) may be making algae blooms worse.

“We don’t have a lot of data on when different parts of the ecosystem are affected at the same time, let alone models that can predict that,” says Paul Van den Brink, a professor who studies chemicals in the environment at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Van den Brink notes that algae blooms in the Netherlands’ iconic dikes and drainage ditches may have also been exacerbated by last summer’s record-breaking heatwave.

In a paper published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Van den Brink and a group of European chemists raised concerns about what new ecological impacts will mean for chemical regulators.

Substance regulation in Europe, Canada and the U.S. often looks at one substance and impact at a time. That neglects possible synergetic effects between the two that could be greater than their sum, says Van den Brink.

The scientific community needs a lot more data on how substances behave in the environment to create a regulatory framework that accounts for those synergetic effects, according to the paper entitled Toward Sustainable Environmental Quality: Priority Research Questions for Europe.

For one, while climate change is global, in-depth data on concentrations of contaminants is currently limited to North America, Europe and in a smaller way China. More global initiatives are needed to identify pollution hot spots and focus mitigation efforts, the authors said.

Pollution hot spots

One of those authors, University of York professor Alistair Boxall, is currently leading an international study that’s collecting samples of drug traces found in river systems around the world. The mega-study covers 61 pharmaceuticals and 165 rivers in 72 countries from New Zealand to South Africa to Mexico.

After entering our bodies, fractions of the drugs that are not metabolized are excreted into wastewater. Roughly 80% of pharmaceuticals in the environment enter waterways in this way, with the remainder entering via manufacturer discharges and consumers flushing unwanted or expired drugs.

Early data from Nigeria has shown that the concentration of pharmaceuticals in Lagos, an ultra-dense city with poor sewer treatment, was one hundred times higher than that of York, U.K., Boxall said.

Concerns over antibacterial resistance led Boxall and his team to survey 14 different antibiotics as well as more complex substances like antimalarial compounds.

“That will be very interesting to see how antibiotic exposure in the environment varies,” Boxall said. “There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that resistance and the presence of antibiotics in the environments is affecting [mortality] globally.”

Once additional data is compiled, Boxall and the other scientists behind the paper agreed that a new way of monitoring chemicals needs to be developed. Physical and chemical monitoring needs to be combined with emerging technology such as water-borne robots, remote sensing and genomic sequencing to enable faster and more efficient collection of data across longer time frames and wider spaces.

Global response

Some governments are taking steps to avoid the increased risks from chemicals undergoing synergistic effects in the environment. Switzerland invested US$1 billion to upgrade 100 wastewater treatment plants and adopted a federal sewage tax of US$9 per person per year to help cover maintenance costs. The country requires pharmaceutical companies to test their wastewater for biodegradability and to pre-treat water that does not meet requirements.

In the Netherlands, a chain approach that brings together various ministries, regional authorities and stakeholders including pharma companies, doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and water utilities, has begun implementing measures to raise awareness, improve water quality and produce safe drinking water.

Some pharmaceutical companies are trying to minimize the risk by building safe disposal practices at their production facilities. To determine the impact on the environment around its plants, for example, Astra-Zeneca has been looking at species that are higher on the food chain, such as fish-gulping otters.

Researchers from the University of Exeter and Astra-Zeneca found that the harmful impact of Clotrimazole, an endocrine-disrupting anti-fungal chemical, on zebrafish was amplified when the experiment was conducted in the warmer water temperatures predicted for the year 2100.

The future of chemicals

The most important long-term steps include reforming how governments approve products and improving post-approval monitoring, an immense undertaking given the fact that roughly 2,000 new chemical substances are introduced annually.

Environmental Defence Canada toxic program manager Muhannad Malas said that Canada’s federal regulators are lagging behind in adopting research that should be used during substance approvals, especially when it comes to chemicals that can affect the human endocrine system.

“When our law was written, we were dealing with industrial pollution,” says Malas. “We didn’t know much about hormone-disrupting chemicals that can impact people at low levels, especially pregnant women, babies in the womb and infants.”

The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, the federal legislation that outlines how chemicals are approved for use, should be updated to reflect that new science, he says.

Canada’s federal government has ruled out final changes to the act until after the fall election.

The post Climate crisis may force us to rethink how we regulate and approve chemicals appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The tech company wants to end the causes of negative health that arise outside of clinics. Its software platform gives health care payers, hospitals and providers a tool to search for social services, identify patients’ needs and eligibility for benefits, and coordinate care. Low-income patients get access to housing, nutrition and job search assistance to improve their health and economic stability.

By investing $500,000 (U.S.) equity in Healthify in 2016 – and helping facilitate a total capital raise of $2.5 million – Acumen is now seeking to scale the social enterprise.

“We think they will play an important role helping low-income patients manage the root causes of their health problems,” says Catherine Casey Nanda, director of Acumen America. It offers a great opportunity to change the way the U.S. health care system addresses social factors that influence someone’s health, she says.

This was the first investment within Acumen’s new U.S. portfolio. It’s an example of the bold new experiments underway in the burgeoning field of social investing for poverty alleviation in North America.

Globally, 800 million people are still living on less than $1.25 a day. But there are elements of both the developing and developed worlds in all countries.

After investing $101 million across 92 social enterprises in Africa, South Asia and Latin America since 2001, New York-based impact investor Acumen is now expanding at home.

The American dream is increasingly threatened by income inequality and low prospects of social mobility for the marginalized.

One in five children and 43 million people live in poverty in the U.S. And 40 million people are food-insecure.

“The problem is enormous,” says Nanda. “We see a huge opportunity to use some of the things that America is great at – the power of American entrepreneurship and innovation – to tackle poverty at home.”

But the talented entrepreneurs dedicated to solving social challenges often lack the risk capital and management expertise needed to scale, according to Nanda.

Acumen’s new U.S. portfolio invests capital and business support into social enterprises in three sectors: health care, workforce development and financial inclusion.  Philanthropic funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Barclays and the Hitachi Foundation were invested by Acumen America in five social enterprises in 2016, the program’s inaugural year. Those investments included a company offering affordable insurance and loans for low-income American Latinos and another that is expanding access to employment for trade- and vocational-school students.

A growing number of impact investors are aiming to generate positive social or environmental impact alongside financial returns. But in Acumen’s case, patient, high-risk-tolerance capital is invested for the long term, up to 10 years, and exit returns are recycled into new social investments.

North of the border, Canada is seeing rapid growth in impact investing. There was $9.2 billion (Canadian) of assets managed as impact investments in 2015, an increase of 123 per cent over 2013, according to the Responsible Investment Association, a Canadian social investment trade association.

Globally, a 2015 survey of 46 large-scale asset managers reported $60 billion (U.S.) in impact investments in their portfolios, according to the nonprofit Global Impact Investing Network.

Many new social investments are being structured as partnerships between public agencies, private investors and nonprofit service deliverers.

Partnerships represent a growing push towards placing peoples’ needs – and project outcomes – at the centre of social programs, explains Adam Jagelewski, director of the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing, a hub supporting social finance development in Canada.

“It’s ineffective for…the Ministry of Health, because they have the largest budget, to think that it’s only their responsibility to work on programs related to a homeless population,” explains Jagelewski. Research shows there are mental health, housing and justice issues, and they are all interconnected, he says.

Healthify is itself part of a larger, cross-sector effort.

Healthify built the software platform and works with payers, insurance providers and health workers to implement the service.

And this is taking place after a shift in government policy.

Rather than being paid on a fee-for-service basis, payers and providers are now paid a single amount to keep a patient healthy, which encourages them to pay attention to patients’ social needs outside of the health care system, according to Acumen’s Nanda.

Another cross-sector social investment, an affordable housing fund for low-income indigenous peoples living on reserves in Canada, is being championed by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, a private Montreal-based grantor and impact investor.

Sixty per cent of on-reserve homes need repairs, and over the next 10 years there is a projected housing deficit of 80,000 units, according to Erica Barbosa Vargas, the McConnell Foundation’s director of solutions finance. But since land on reserves is owned by the Crown and cannot be used as security for a loan, conventional banks have been reluctant to lend, she explains.

To tackle the problem in the Huron community of Wendake near Quebec City, the Aboriginal Savings Corporation of Canada (ABSCAN) offers residents loans to build, buy and sell their houses. Out of the 400 participants in ABSCAN’s program over 10 years, the annual loss rate has never exceeded 2 per cent.

The McConnell Foundation has since partnered with the federal Ministry of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada to finance and expand ABSCAN’s Wendake model to four communities across Quebec. And a commercial lender has come on board.

But the model can only scale nationwide by increasing the pool of capital from other impact and mainstream investors.

Roughly $12 to $13 billion is needed to address housing on reserves across Canada, according to Vargas. That scale exceeds government and philanthropic capacity, and requires financial vehicles that combine different capital sources, she says.

The growth in impact investing is being accompanied by a push towards more rigour in social impact measurement.

Under particular scrutiny are social impact bonds (SIB), a new structure for financing social programs that requires outcome-based metrics.

In a SIB, investors finance interventions upfront, which are then delivered by social service providers. Investors are repaid by government and earn returns only if there is improved performance.

SIBs typically focus on prevention for the vulnerable. Governments can potentially realize cost savings through prevention, and transfer risk to investors.

Since the first SIB was introduced in 2010, over 50 of these bonds have become operational and two dozen more are under design, with the U.K. and U.S. experimenting most.

Canada’s first SIB was introduced in the Province of Saskatchewan in 2014 to provide at-risk single mothers with affordable housing.

But the few completed SIBs have yielded mixed results and performance assessment has been suspect, according to John Loxley, a professor of economics at University of Manitoba who is researching SIBs.

A problem arises from the fact that investors, alongside the government, get to sign off on outcome metrics, giving them the power to stack the deck in their favour.

“It looks like [in the Saskatchewan case] they are meeting their targets, but they’ve done it by choosing women who would’ve met the target anyways,” says Loxley. “It’s cherry-picking, it’s not genuine.”

But SIBs have a five to 10-year maturity and the jury is still out on their performance.

And Jagelewski from the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing says that the government has a strong and equal say, as do the provider and the investors, in setting performance targets.

The MaRS centre recently helped structure a new three-year, $4-million SIB – in partnership with the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, and 11 private investors – aimed at helping seniors with pre-hypertension in Toronto and Vancouver control their blood pressure.

“The biggest value proposition of the model is that governments pay if and only if the intervention is successful,” he says. “The [government] is defining what success looks like and they are going to pay only if that success measure is hit.”

For its part, Acumen has pioneered a customer-first approach to impact measurement called “lean data.”

Over six weeks in 2015-2016, Acumen’s Lean Data Sprint saw its companies gather data from their customers through a survey sent via SMS and follow-up phone interviews. Eighteen social enterprises provided 500 of their customers’ phone numbers and permission to contact them.

Customer responses revealed many insights, from the impact of a solar heating system in Uganda to that of an agricultural loan to smallholder Kenyan farmers.

Next year Acumen America will implement several lean data projects with its U.S. investees.

“We think it’s critical not only to understanding our impacts but also to help companies get customer insights that will help them drive better products and services,” says Nanda.

Acumen is leading the charge in impact measurement and in social investments to tackle the systemic causes of American poverty. And with plans to grow its U.S. portfolio to 25 social enterprises in five years, there is still hope for a more inclusive society.

The post Social investments for the marginalized take off in North America appeared first on Corporate Knights.

An initiative called the Health Impact Fund (HIF) has its eyes set on making medicines affordable and available to all. Supported by leading health scientists, Nobel-prize winning researchers and even former Canadian prime minister Paul Martin, it proposes a system that incentivizes pharmaceutical companies to research and develop drugs for neglected diseases and provides financial rewards to those that significantly reduce the global burden of disease.

“There are inadequate incentives for firms to engage in research and development of new products that are focused on the needs of poor people,” said Aidan Hollis, president of the fund and professor of health economics at the University of Calgary. “There is plenty of money put into drugs for cancer and Alzheimer’s, but in other areas … there is simply not very much commercial money put into the mix.”

The brainchild of Hollis and eminent Yale moral philosopher Thomas Pogge, the HIF takes aim at the so-called 10/90 gap – only 10 per cent of global health care resources are spent on developing countries where 90 per cent of preventable diseases occur.

Now, the team is setting up a $100 million (U.S.) pilot project with the ultimate goal of developing a $6 billion fund that would support the development of 25 to 30 new life-saving drugs.

HIF’s backers believe their approach would make health care more equitable and help end the scourge of rampant, curable diseases, all towards hitting the UN Sustainable Development Goal targets of eradicating AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and combating hepatitis and other communicable diseases by 2030.

In the early 2000s, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria were causing four million deaths per year. Since then, billions were poured into health development programs. Over 20 million lives have been saved and death rates for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria declined significantly

But big challenges remain. A new Lancet study finds that HIV infections are on the rise in 74 countries. More than 6,000 young girls in southern Africa are infected with HIV every week. In Vietnam, 17,000 people a year die from tuberculosis. And in India, 1,000 people, mostly children, die from malaria each year.

One major obstacle to reaching the poor is the high cost of drugs.

A powerful new antiviral drug to treat hepatitis C is being marketed as Sovaldi by the pharmaceutical company Gilead, but was introduced in the U.S. with a steep price tag of $84,000 for a 12-week treatment course, according to a report by Doctors Without Borders. Gilead has enabled access through generic licensing permits in over 100 low-income countries. But 38 middle-income countries, where 70 per cent of people with hepatitis C live, are excluded. Patients who cannot afford the $2,000 to $12,000 treatments will have to go without care.

But the cost of producing a new drug is a massive undertaking. The most recent estimate is $1.4 billion to get a drug to market. And that just covers R&D, as each drug also incurs testing costs for regulatory approval and legal fees to file patents in different countries, as well as administrative, manufacturing and marketing costs, according to Hollis. Those costs are used to justify exorbitant drug prices, since companies must recover their investments.

At least one firm sees wisdom in finding innovative ways to finance R&D for neglected diseases.

Janssen, the pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson, is supporting HIF’s pilot study with Johns Hopkins University and a hospital in Mumbai aiming to demonstrate the feasibility of measuring outcomes of new tuberculosis drugs. Those outcomes are difficult to measure because treatments for multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR TB, are highly complex, requiring four to eight different drugs, thousands of pills and injections for up to 24 months. Janssen’s drug Sirturo – the first new drug developed for MDR TB in 40 years – is available for the study.

“We need to move to an outcome-based approach, versus activity-based, and that means collaboration at scale with shared and transparent goals,” said Adrian Thomas, vice president for global market access, commercial strategy operations and global public health at Janssen. “That is a challenge because it really requires a different way of thinking.”

Rather than blowing up the patent system, the HIF is a new way to spur R&D. “The HIF is a kind of bypass,” explained Pogge. “It opens a second road through which pharmaceutical innovators can be rewarded and patients can get access to drugs.”

That is because the fund would preserve the patent system, which promotes innovation by offering market exclusivity for new drugs for specified periods. A firm could still register a new drug on the patent track and set its price or it could provide its medicine to the poor at a non-profit price and reap lucrative rewards according to the drug’s health impact.

But not all are convinced that firms deserve such pay-for-performance incentives. Pharmaceutical companies already enjoy intellectual property rights that favour their private interests over citizens’ health needs, according to Burcu Kilic, legal and policy director at the Global Access to Medicines Program at Public Citizen, a non-profit think tank.

“The biggest problem is that we have these patent monopolies and pharma companies are using their lobbying power to push for higher and higher [intellectual property protection] through trade agreements,” said Kilic. “They are crying crocodiles … like ‘We need incentives.’”

She also argues that pharmaceutical companies already benefit from publicly-funded basic research by universities and the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., where there is also an access to affordable medicines problem.

Still, companies believe that R&D financing needs are so large that many innovative approaches are welcome.

“We have to see a continual stream of activity in basic R&D to be able to identify those new drugs and technologies that may make a difference 10 years later,” said Jami Taylor, Janssen’s senior director of global access policy.

HIF’s founders believe they have found a practical middle ground. “This band-aid fix doesn’t give us the ideal system but it gives us something that works a lot better than the status quo,” said Pogge.

And it’s a cause they will fight for in the days ahead.

The HIF plans on holding an international donors conference for the mini-HIF at the World Bank in 2017. This fall, Pogge will pitch the fund to foundations and the Indian and German governments. The Germans have already given preliminary support with a parliamentary motion to fund the initiative introduced by the Social Democratic Party.

“My dream is that these two governments can bring along a number of other governments, in the German case in the EU and in the Indian case, countries like Brazil and South Africa,” said Pogge. “We are trying our best to make this happen.”

The post A different way to R&D appeared first on Corporate Knights.