Log In Sign Up

Search for any green Service

Find green products from around the world in one place

Window cleaning

Singapore Safety Glass

Tag: health

Has Covid-19 helped ease air pollution?

Posted on by dishanth
Has Covid-19 helped ease air pollution?

The two-month drop in pollution may have saved more lives in China than the global death toll from the Covid-19 virus, but it should not be considered a “silver lining” of the pandemic, an expert warns.

Air pollution has significantly decreased over China amid the economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, signaling unanticipated implications for human health.

“Given the huge amount of evidence that breathing dirty air contributes heavily to premature mortality, a natural — if admittedly strange — question is whether the lives saved from this reduction in pollution caused by economic disruption from Covid-19 exceeds the death toll from the virus itself,” Stanford University environmental resource economist Marshall Burke wrote in the global food, environment and economic dynamics blog, G-FEED.

“Even under very conservative assumptions, I think the answer is a clear ‘yes,’” he added.

Following China’s actions to control the spread of the virus via mandatory quarantine, NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) pollution monitoring satellites detected a reduction of nitrogen dioxide (NO2)—a gas emitted when fossil fuels such as oil, gas or coal are burned—over China.

Other analyses have reported a reduction of ground-based concentrations of fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, also a harmful pollutant.

Using this data, as well as estimates of the economic disruption caused by Covid-19, Burke ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the potential number of lives that could be saved by this drop in air pollution.

The two-month pollution drop, Burke estimates, has saved the lives of 4,000 children under the age of 5 and 73,000 adults over the age of 70 in China — significantly more than the global death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic at the time of calculation.

“Even under these more conservative assumptions,” Burke wrote, “the lives saved due to the pollution reductions are roughly 20x the number of lives that have been directly lost to the virus (based on March 8 estimates of 3,100 Chinese Covid-19 deaths, taken from here).”

The European Society of Cardiology has called air pollution itself a pandemic, responsible for shortening lives on a scale greater than malaria, war and violence, HIV/AIDS, and smoking combined. Air pollution disproportionally affects children under 5 and the elderly.

A recent study estimated that air pollution caused an extra 8.8 million premature deaths globally per year, representing an average of a three-year shortening of life expectancy across the human population.

 

If there is any environmental lesson, it’s perhaps the useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo like the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods absent a pandemic.

Marshall Burke, environmental resource economist, Stanford University

 

“About two-thirds of premature deaths are attributable to human-made air pollution, mainly from fossil fuel use; this goes up to 80 per cent in high-income countries,” Thomas Münzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Department of Cardiology of the University Medical Centre in Mainz, Germany, said in a statement.

Images released by NASA show a dramatic reduction of NO2 during the quarantines in China (Feb. 10-25) compared to before the quarantines (Jan. 1-20). The NO2 pollution reduction appeared first near the city of Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have originated and a strict quarantine was put in place beginning on Jan. 23.

Though it is typical to see some decrease in air pollution as factories and businesses close during the Lunar New Year celebrations in China (which this year ran from the end of January into early February), researchers say they believe this is more than a holiday effect. The rates have not rebounded, as they would in a typical year.

“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” said Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

While the economic disruption caused by Covid-19 might have reduced air pollution, Burke said we should not think of this as a “silver lining” or a “benefit” of the pandemic. The pandemic is harmful to health directly and the broader disruption it is causing — lost incomes, inability to receive care for non-Covid-19 illnesses and injuries, etc. — could have far-reaching implications.

“None of my calculations support any idea that pandemics are good for health,” Burke writes. “The effects I calculate just represent health benefits from the air pollution changes wrought by the economic disruption, and do not account for the many other short or long-term negative consequences of this disruption on health or other outcomes; these harms likely vastly exceed any health benefits from reduced air pollution.”

The pandemic is forcing many to experiment with different ways of doing things. Substituting remote and online work for commuting and travel, for example, reduces fossil fuel emissions. Some of these changes could have meaningful environmental benefits that could, in turn, benefit human health.

“If there is any environmental lesson, it’s perhaps the useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo … i.e. the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods absent a pandemic,” Burke told Mongabay.

“I know my own carbon footprint is going to go down by probably 75 per cent this year. Hopefully, we can translate these experiments into more durable changes in how we do things, once (hopefully) the epidemic is under control.”

This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.

 

 

Source: www.eco-business.com

Fossil fuel funding by world’s biggest banks has grown every year since the Paris Agreement, report finds

Posted on by dishanth
Fossil fuel funding by world’s biggest banks has grown every year since the Paris Agreement, report finds

America’s JP Morgan Chase has pumped more than the GDP of Finland into fossil fuels expansion since the Paris climate accord of 2015, while Japan’s and China’s mega banks have also been ‘failing miserably’ in their response to climate change over the last four years, a report from a coalition of NGOs has shown.

 

It’s as if the penny hasn’t dropped for the financial services industry that climate change is not only an increasingly disruptive environmental phenomenon, but a grave risk to the stability of the global economy.

Financial support for the fossil fuel industry has increased every year since the Paris Agreement came into being in 2015, according to a new report, Banking on Climate Change 2020, from a collective of environmental groups including Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack and Indigenous Environmental Network.

The Paris Agreement recommended that global warming be capped at 2°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change. To do so, scientists say greenhouse gas emissions, the bulk of which come from the burning of fossil fuels, must be slashed.

However, the report found that 35 global banks have not only been maintaining but expanding the fossil fuels sector, with more than US$2.7 trillion in investments made since 2015.

 

It is unconscionable for banks to be approving new loans and raising capital for the companies that are pushing hardest to increase carbon emissions.

Alison Kirsch, climate and energy leader researcher, Rainforest Action Network

 

United States-headquartered banks JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank of America have accounted for 30 per cent of all fossil fuel financing from the major global banks since the Paris accord.

JPMorgan Chase, which recently announced it will close one-fifth of its branches in the US in response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, pumped US$269 billion—more than the gross domestic product of Finland—into the fossil fuels sector over the last four years, notably in fossil fuel expansion, Arctic oil and gas, offshore oil and gas, and fracking.

In Asia, Tokyo-headquartered Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) was the region’s biggest fossil fuel financer and the world’s sixth-biggest financier, investing US$119 billion since 2015.

 

The investments in fossil fuels made by the world’s biggest 35 banking institutions between 2016 and 2019. Source: Banking on climate change report.

 

Counting out coal

China’s mega banks were found to be world’s biggest financiers of coal—the single biggest driver of greenhouse gas emissions—since the Paris Agreement. China Construction Bank and Bank of China are the biggest bankers of coal mining, pumping US$25 billion into the sector between them. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Bank of China were the heaviest funders of coal power globally, investing US$42 billion combined, according to the report.

However, financial support for the carbon-intensive fuel is dwindling globally, the report noted. Finance to the top 30 coal mining companies fell by 6 per cent between 2016 and 2019, while finance to the top 30 coal power companies shrank by 13 per cent.

Though China’s banks are a noteable exception, the report found that 26 of the 35 banks in the report now have policies restricting coal finance, which has helped to push the finance sector away from coal. China’s big four banks do not have any climate policies in place.

A growing minority of the world’s biggest banks—now 16—now also restrict finance to some oil and gas sectors. The report said European banks have the toughest fossil fuel lending restrictions. France’s Crédit Agricole, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Italy’s Unicredit are said to have the most progressive climate policies.

 

Banking on Paris

The majority of the world’s top banks are signatories of frameworks such as the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Banking and the Equator Principles, which commit banks to align their business strategies with the Paris Agreement.

But because potential emissions from the coal, oil and natural gas already in production exhaust the carbon budget for the 2°C warming limit of the Paris Agreement, any bank that supports the further expansion of the fossil fuel sector is Paris-incompatible, the report noted.

Alison Kirsch, climate and energy leader researcher, Rainforest Action Network, said that it is “crystal clear” that banks are “failing miserably” in their response to climate change and the decarbonisation of the global economy.

“As the toll of death and destruction from unprecedented floods, droughts, fires and storms grows, it is unconscionable and outrageous for banks to be approving new loans and raising capital for the companies that are pushing hardest to increase carbon emissions,” she said.

The report emerges at a time when the ongoing Covid-19 coronavirus is threatening to derail investment in renewable energy, according to the International Energy Agency.

 

Source: https://www.eco-business.com/

Poor air quality leads to depression and bipolar disorder, study finds

Posted on by dishanth
Poor air quality leads to depression and bipolar disorder, study finds

Air pollution chokes lungs and shortens lives but is also linked to a higher risk of mental illnesses, said researchers on Tuesday in a study based on health data from millions of patients in the United States and Denmark.

People exposed to poor quality air in both countries were more likely to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or depression, found the study, although critics argued it was flawed and said more research was needed to draw firm conclusions.

“There’s quite a few known triggers (for mental illness) but pollution is a new direction,” study leader Andrey Rzhetsky, of the University of Chicago told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Research on dogs and rodents shows air pollution can get into the brain and cause inflammation which results in symptoms resembling depression. It’s quite possible that the same thing happens in humans.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that air pollution kills 7 million people each year – equivalent to 13 deaths every minute – more than the combined total of war, murder, tuberculosis, HIV, AIDs and malaria.

It could shorten the life expectancy of children born today by an average of 20 months, according to research published by U.S. nonprofit, the Health Effects Institute, earlier this year.

Increasing concern over the issue has seen cities including Paris, Bogota, and Jakarta experiment with car-free days.

But while pollution’s impact on physical health is well known, links with mental illness have been less explored.

Researchers compared health data and local pollution exposure for 151 million U.S. residents and 1.4 million Danish patients for the study published in the PLOS Biology journal.

 

Cartogram maps showing the spatial patterns of apparent neurological and psychiatric disorder prevalence inferred from IBM MarketScan database.
Image: PLOS Biology

 

For the Danish patients they compared mental health to exposure to air pollution up to the age of 10 while in the United States they looked at real-time pollution levels.

Childhood exposure was linked to a more than two-fold increase in schizophrenia among the Danish patients, said the researchers, as well as higher rates of personality disorder, depression and bipolar.

The U.S. data also found poor air quality was associated with higher levels of bipolar and depression, but did not find it was correlated to several other conditions including schizophrenia, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease.

However, the study has proved controversial.

A critical commentary by Stanford professor John Ioannidis, which was published alongside the study, said it raised an “intriguing possibility” that air pollution might cause mental illnesses but had failed to make a clear case.

“Despite analyses involving large datasets, the available evidence has substantial shortcomings and a long series of potential biases may invalidate the observed associations,” he wrote.

 

 

Written by

Sonia Elks, Journalist, Reuters

This article is published in collaboration with Thomson Reuters Foundation trust.org.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Biodiversity and our brains: How ecology and mental health go together in our cities

Posted on by dishanth
Biodiversity and our brains: How ecology and mental health go together in our cities

Biodiverse nature is particularly beneficial for mental well-being. There is also growing and compelling evidence that contact with diverse microbiomes in the soil and air has a profound effect on depression and anxiety.

 

 

Mental health in our cities is an increasingly urgent issue. Rates of disorders such as anxiety and depression are high. Urban design and planning can promote mental health by refocusing on spaces we use in our everyday lives in light of what research tells us about the benefits of exposure to nature and biodiversity.

Mental health issues have many causes. However, the changing and unpredictable elements of our physical and sensory environments have a profound impact on risk, experiences and recovery.

Physical activity is still the mainstay of urban planning efforts to enable healthy behaviours. Mental well-being is then a hoped-for byproduct of opportunities for exercise and social interaction.

Neuroscientific research and tools now allow us to examine more deeply some of the ways in which individuals experience spaces and natural elements. This knowledge can greatly add to, and shift, the priorities and direction of urban design and planning.

 

What do we mean by ‘nature’?

A large body of research has compellingly shown that “nature” in its many forms and contexts can have direct benefits on mental health. Unfortunately, the extent and diversity of natural habitats in our cities are decreasing rapidly.

Too often “nature” – by way of green space and “POS” (Public Open Space) – is still seen as something separate from other parts of our urban neighbourhoods. Regeneration efforts often focus on large green corridors. But even small patches of genuinely biodiverse nature can re-invite and sustain multitudes of plant and animal species, as urban ecologists have shown.

It has also been widely demonstrated that nature does not effect us in uniform or universal ways. Sometimes it can be confronting or dangerous. That is particularly true if nature is isolated or uninviting, or has unwritten rules around who should be there or what activities are appropriate.

These factors complicate the desire for a “nature pill” to treat urban ills.

We need to be far more specific about what “nature” we are talking about in design and planning to assist with mental health.

 

 

Why does biodiversity matter?

The exponential accessibility and affordability of lab and mobile technologies, such as fMRI and EEG measuring brain activity, have vastly widened the scope of studies of mental health and nature. Researchers are able, for example, to analyse responses to images of urban streetscapes versus forests. They can also track people’s perceptions “on the move”.

Research shows us biodiverse nature has particular positive benefit for mental well-being. Multi-sensory elements such as bird or frog sounds or wildflower smells have well-documented beneficial effects on mental restoration, calm and creativity.

Other senses – such as our sense of ourselves in space, our balance and equilibrium and temperature – can also contribute to us feeling restored by nature.

Acknowledging the crucial role all these senses play shifts the focus of urban design and planning from visual aesthetics and functional activity to how we experience natural spaces. This is particularly important in ensuring we create places for people of all abilities, mobilities and neurodiversities.

Neuroscientific research also shows an “enriched” environment – one with multiple diverse elements of interest – can prompt movement and engagement. This helps keep our brains cognitively healthy, and us happier.

Beyond brain imaging of experiences in nature, there is growing and compelling evidence that contact with diverse microbiomes in the soil and air has a profound effect on depression and anxiety. Increasing our interaction with natural elements through touch – literally getting dirt under our nails – is both psychologically therapeutic and neurologically nourishing.

We also have increasing evidence that air, noise and soil pollution increase risk of mental health disorders in cities.

 

What does this mean for urban neighbourhoods?

These converging illustrations suggest biodiverse urban nature is a priority for promoting mental health. Our job as designers and planners is therefore to multiply opportunities to interact with these areas in tangible ways.

The concept of “biophilia” isn’t new. But a focus on incidental and authentic biodiversity helps us apply this very broad, at times unwieldy and non-contextual, concept to the local environment. This grounds efforts in real-time, achievable interventions.

 

 

Using novel technologies and interdisciplinary research expands our understanding of the ways our environments affect our mental well-being. This knowledge challenges the standardised planning of nature spaces and monocultured plantings in our cities. Neuroscience can therefore support urban designers and planners in allowing for more flexibility and authenticity of nature in urban areas.

Neuroscientific evidence of our sensory encounters with biodiverse nature points us towards the ultimate win-win (-win) for ecology, mental health and cities.

 

 

Dr Zoe Myers is the author of Wildness and Wellbeing: Nature, Neuroscience, and Urban Design (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). This article was originally published on The Conversation.