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“We cannot go back to ‘normal.’ The post-pandemic recovery presents a potentially pivotal moment to meet the twin crises of inequality and climate change head on, and to build towards a more equitable, just, and sustainable future.” — Larry Brown, NUPGE President
Ottawa (28 May 2021) — Canadian Environment Week begins on Monday, May 31. Established in 1971, Canadian Environment Week celebrates environmental protection and sustainability. The week includes Canada Clean Air Day (June 2) and UN World Environment Day (June 5).
This year, Canadian Environment Week brings home just how important a healthy environment is to human health.
Everyone deserves clean air to breathe
Air pollution has serious impacts on our health, as this NUPGE factsheet outlines.
“The importance of access to clean air has become even clearer over the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Larry Brown, NUPGE President. There is a growing body of evidence on the relationship between air pollution and risk of COVID-19 infection and death, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“Air pollution hurts all of us,” said Brown, “but we know that low-income and racialized communities disproportionately experience air pollution and its negative health effects.” This is an example of environmental injustice, and specifically, environmental racism, which NUPGE has written about here. A new mapping tool from the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium offers a visual of how air pollution is unevenly distributed across neighbourhoods and communities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to the importance of indoor air quality too. This includes the need for safe, well-ventilated air in our workplaces — during the pandemic and beyond.
Repairing the damage done
Just as there is discussion about recovery and rebuilding after the pandemic, we are in a moment of reckoning with the damage done by humans to our environment.
The 2021 theme for World Environment Day (WED), is “Reimagine. Recreate. Restore.” According to the United Nations,
For too long, we have been exploiting and destroying our planet’s ecosystems. Every 3 seconds, the world loses enough forest to cover a football pitch and over the last century we have destroyed half of our wetlands. As much as 50% of our coral reefs have already been lost and up to 90% of coral reefs could be lost by 2050, even if global warming is limited to an increase of 1.5°C.
Ecosystem loss is depriving the world of carbon sinks, like forests and peatlands, at a time humanity can least afford it. Global greenhouse gas emissions have grown for three consecutive years and the planet is on pace for potentially catastrophic climate change.
The emergence of COVID-19 has also shown just how disastrous the consequences of ecosystem loss can be. By shrinking the area of natural habitat for animals, we have created ideal conditions for pathogens — including coronaviruses — to spread.…Ecosystem restoration means preventing, halting and reversing this damage — to go from exploiting nature to healing it.
Reimaging our future
Restoring and reimaging our ecosystems includes our social and economic systems too. It’s become widely acknowledged that the COVID crisis has exposed and exacerbated the gaps and inequities in our systems, which desperately need repair.
Last year, NUPGE joined hundreds of organizations in signing onto the principles for a Just Recovery. With more and more talk of the post-pandemic recovery, and commitments to build back better, the Just Recovery principles are more important than ever.
“We cannot go back to ‘normal,’” said Brown. “The post-pandemic recovery presents a potentially pivotal moment to meet the twin crises of inequality and climate change head on, and to build towards a more equitable, just, and sustainable future.”