One worker's push to get her pension to divest from fossil fuels

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This week:

• One worker's push to get her pension to divest from fossil fuels
• The great urban wildlife shift
• Low-cost sensors can point to solutions for world's most polluted cities

One worker's push to get her pension to divest from fossil fuels

As a pediatric physiotherapist, Elizabeth Houlding spends a lot of her time with young people. She is responsible for working with students at 70 elementary schools and high schools in the Ottawa area. 

Houlding began paying into a pension fund last September, when she took on a full-time permanent position. She has concerns about where her retirement money is being invested.

"As a young person, there's a lot of uncertainty," Houlding, 26, said after work one day.

"It seems pretty clear at this point that rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels is the only path to a livable future."

Houlding works for the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario and is a member of the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP).

HOOPP, which has roughly $104 billion in assets, has come under criticism from pension watchdogs and some of its beneficiaries for investing too much money in fossil fuel companies.

It received a grade of C in a recent analysis of the climate policies of the country's major pension funds, up from a D the year before.

The report was produced by Shift: Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health.
HOOPP improved its standing by increasing its green investments and committing to reducing emissions. But it was also called out for failing to come up with a plan to divest more quickly from fossil fuels, and for not having a strong enough approach to ensure the companies it invests in "have credible transition plans."

"The fund still has considerable work to do," Shift's report concluded.

When asked about the criticism, a spokesperson for HOOPP referred to a document outlining the fund's approach and climate policies. 

"As a pension plan, we have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver on our pension promise to Ontario healthcare workers," the fund said. 

"We consider climate risk as part of our investment management process."

Still, Houlding feels more could be done. She is part of a pressure campaign that has been emailing the fund manager, and she hopes to become a union steward to have a bigger voice. 

"Really, it's going to take 'people power' to pressure these pensions," she said. 
"No one's going to listen to just me."

Houlding wants the pension fund to be aligned with the Paris agreement goal to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 C. 

"They've kind of made commitments that they want to stop making some new investments, and they're going to do that by 2025," she said.

"But I mean, it's just not soon enough. Everything needs to move very quickly if we want to have a stable climate."

Pension funds have more than $4 trillion in assets in Canada, and an estimated $56 trillion globally. Given their powerful position in the financial sector and long-term investment horizon, climate activists — and the World Bank — contend they can play a leading role in accelerating the transition to renewable energy. 

Houlding said her work as a physiotherapist, often with children more vulnerable to illness, has made even more clear the need for a stable climate and clean air.

"We saw in the pandemic that it had a really big impact on these kids," she said.
"Climate change and a climate uncertain future would have an even bigger impact for them."

— Benjamin Shingler

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Reader feedback

Last week's issue included a story about an artificial wetland in Moncton designed to filter road salt from a snow dump and stop it from contaminating local waterways. Keith Rasmussen wrote: "But what is the health of the 'other' wildlife living in a wetland that is so grossly polluted?"

Bob Edgar had a related question: "If the concentration of these pollutants are lower at the outlet, they must be accumulating in the wetland. Surely the ever rising concentration of pollutants in the wetland must be dealt with at some point?"

We put the questions to Adam Campbell of Ducks Unlimited, the conservation group behind the project, and Jade Raizenne, of the Ducks Unlimited subsidiary Native Plant Solutions, who helped provide strategies on the wetland plants.

Campbell said much of the "pollution" is actually sand and nutrient-rich topsoil that can lead to algae blooms, deplete oxygen, and make it harder for fish to spawn. "The good news is that these same sediments are quickly knocked out of suspension by the slowing of water through emergent wetland plants. Nutrients from fertile soil are absorbed by these quickly growing plants and finer sediments are fixed in place by their roots." As for the salt, Raizenne said some is absorbed by salt-tolerant plants, removing it from the water. Campbell said the rest is diluted by the water in the pond, and much of it is flushed out gradually during the rest of the year.

"The wetland is able to slow the release of the contaminants and trap them in vegetation growth. This results in little consequence to the species using the wetland," Campbell wrote. "We do not foresee a need to actively remove 'contaminated' substrate."

For a future issue, we're interested in your tips to live more sustainably and save money at the same time. Do you have some to share?

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. 

Have a compelling personal story about climate change you want to share with CBC News? Pitch a First Person column here.

The Big Picture: The great Canadian urban wildlife shift

Pigeons, rats, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, turtles. Despite cities' natural shortcomings, animals thrive among their concrete rivers and steel trees. They benefit urban ecosystems and the humans living there by consuming pests and pollinating plants, among other things. Some even become icons, like the Toronto blue jay.

But the animal mosaic that distinguishes Montreal from Montgomery is influenced by climate. So, it stands that as cities experience climate change, with wetter (or drier) weather and hotter seasons, the animals that trot, hop and fly through them will also change.

A new study by Toronto researchers found that climate change could bring massive wildlife shifts to North American cities. The team looked at more than 2,000 species in 60 Canadian and U.S. cities, under a variety of climate scenarios, and found evidence of an "impending great urban shift where thousands of species will disappear across the selected cities, being replaced by new species, or not replaced at all."

The California grizzly bear has been extinct since 1924 (for other human-caused reasons), but prowls across the state flag. With climate change, the Toronto Blue Jays might have to revisit their logo in another 100 years. 

– Hannah Hoag

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• Suburbanites drive a lot and have an outsized carbon footprint compared to those who live in downtown or rural areas. That means they could potentially do the most climate good by switching to EVs, argues Andrew Moseman of Heatmap.

• A number of battery electric trains have recently set distance records, offering hope for the technology as an option for electrifying heavy-haul rail.

• Las Vegas is going all in on its water conservation plan.

• This is how regenerative agriculture on the Prairies can help in the climate change fight.

Low-cost sensors can point to solutions for world's most polluted cities

In the megacity of Dhaka, Bangladesh, the air quality on some days can get downright dangerous. Levels of PM2.5, fine particulate matter linked to heart, lung and cognitive issues, often exceed safe health standards. 

"In Bangladesh, we have a national standard, it's about 65 micrograms per cubic metre [µg/m3] for 24 hours," said Riaz Hossain Khan, assistant scientist at BRAC University in Dhaka. But during the dry season, it's much worse.

"If you measure something during December or January, these months, you'll find close to 250 or 300." 

Experts say that's resulting in kids struggling to breathe on smoggy days, and more middle-aged people developing cough-variant asthma, which can be persistent and chronic. 

40 times the WHO guidelines

While the daily concentrations are bad, the picture for the whole year is no better. Bangladesh topped recent global rankings by IQAir, an air quality technology company, for the highest annual average concentrations of PM2.5, at 79.9 µg/m3. The World Health Organization's guidelines recommends five µg/m3. 

Of the top 100 cities in the rankings by IQAir, all but one of them are in Asia, with 83 of them in India alone. (Canada, with its record-breaking wildfire season, jumped up in the same rankings of the risky pollutant.)

Experts say it highlights a need not just for pollution reduction measures — but for more affordable monitoring and measurement tools to figure out what's causing the problem in the first place. 

"You can't make an informed policy decision about air quality without having data," says Jill Baumgartner, who studies air quality and health at McGill University and has worked in low- to middle-income nations.

"The vast majority of countries  — that are some of the most polluted places — don't have anything close to what we have in the city of Montreal." 

Read more about low-cost air pollution monitors from CBC News science and climate journalist Anand Ram.

Stay in touch!

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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty