Data on pollution spewing from Canada’s oil sands underline that fossil fuels is a health issue

News from scientists that Canada’s oil sands may be releasing as many pollution-causing gases as all other sources in Canada combined, including motor traffic and industry, stopped me in my tracks last week.

My native country is the world's fourth-largest crude producer, primarily from the oil sands in the western province of Alberta, which environmental groups say produce three- to four times more greenhouse gases than conventional sources. That is because the oil is locked up in sticky, bituminous sand, and requires vast reserves of energy and water to extract, not to mention the creation of vast tailings ponds of toxic chemical-laced wastewater.

Yet the oil sands industry disputes the “dirty oil” tag, and has pointed to its efforts to tackle methane emissions, the use of carbon capture and storage and waste heat to generate electricity.

Indeed, an analysis from S&P Global last summer found that greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands were flat in 2022, despite an increase in production. In other words, producers could claim a fall in carbon intensity, the climate metric the sector prefers to use instead of total emissions.

Yet this new research, reported in Science magazine in January, factored out greenhouse gases and used new data, collected from 30 air flights over oil sands operations, to instead monitor a broad range of molecules that affect air quality. It throws a harsh new light on the health impact of the oil sands on the communities of Iindigenous people who live downstream.

Some health impacts are already well-known: Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, revealed last year that one of its tailings ponds of toxic wastewater, which can kill birds that land on them, had leaked untreated into the Athabasca River.

Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, an atmospheric chemist at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the project, told Nature magazine: “Having been there, I can tell you it stinks. There are Indigenous communities downwind that have complained about the air quality and the smell. If this industry was close to an urban city, there’s no way this would happen. There would be way more outcry.”

As we will be reporting in our upcoming February-March issue of The Ethical Corporation magazine, air pollution from the fossil fuel industry is no joke. According to the British Medical Journal, phasing out fossil fuels would save 8 millions lives per year.

Health is the human face of climate change, and it is shaping up to be a powerful weapon in the arsenal of climate change campaigners.

ANOTHER STORY on my radar: Nestle has introduced the first KitKat bar made with cocoa mass from beans grown by farmers on its income accelerator programme.

Last year I highlighted the income accelerator programme as a bright spot in a feature on how a five-year cross-industry partnership with cocoa-producers Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire Ivory Coast to end deforestation has been slow to bear fruit.

Through the programme, more than 10 000 families in Côte d'Ivoire Ihave received cash incentives of up to 500 Swiss francs ($542) for adopting good agricultural practices, such as pruning, engaging in agroforestry, diversifying their income through growing other crops and sending their children to school. It is expanding to Ghana this year to include a total of 30 000 families, and aims to reach 160, 000 cocoa-farming families in Nestlée's global cocoa supply chain by 2030.

Taking a similar approach to sourcing of certified sustainable palm oil, which has led to a decrease in commodity-linked deforestation, Nestle says it has achieved full traceability and physical segregation of the cocoa sourced from its income accelerator programme, allowing it to use that segregated cocoa butter for KitKat chocolate in Europe, and with plans to expand in future years.

We’ll be delving into the cocoa supply chain later in the year, as part of our upcoming issue on climate-smart food.

NESTLE WAS NOT on the list of 360 companies that signed up as early adopters of to the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures reporting framework at the World Economic Forum meeting this month. The Swiss company is, however, among 17 companies that are working to develop science-based targets for nature through the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), along with the likes of AB InBev and GSK.

As Mark Hillsdon reported last week, the release of the TNFD early adopters list, along with an interim report from the SBTN, helped keep nature and biodiversity in the spotlight at Davos last week.

Global Witness, however, questioned whether yet more data is the answer to the biodiversity crisis, when so much of the existing information about companies that are harming the environment is effectively ignored.

There was further coverage of Davos by Oliver Balch in his Brand Watch column, which looked at a report from WEF making the case for more meaningful collaborations between private-sector brands and “faith actors”, a category that extends from traditional religious organisations to faith-based investors.

Most radically, the report proposes that religious traditions can offer “values-based guidance and frameworks” to inform business decision-making at a time of growing social division and moral uncertainty.

For her Policy Watch column this month, Angeli Mehta spoke to Bertrand Piccard, co-founder of the Solar Impulse Foundation,  and the first person to fly a plane around the world, powered only by the sun’s energy. Piccard’s foundation has created a database of 1,000 cleantech solutions that it says are efficient, profitable and can be implemented at scale.

He says these give the lie to assertions by many politicians that climate action policies will lose votes due to being too expensive.

“We have to educate the politicians to show them that what was true 20 years ago, what was half-true 10 years ago, is today completely wrong. You have hundreds and hundreds of solutions that will stimulate economic development, employment, profit … and at the same time, will be beneficial for the population”.

We also published a couple of feature articles from our latest magazine, on how AI is helping to turn the tide on deforestation risk, by Mark Hillsdon, and Ben Payton’s report on the deployment of machine learning and digital technologies to make agriculture more sustainable.

ONE OF THE COUNTRIES that was an early leader in climate action is the UK, as the first country to regulate decarbonisation targets in the Climate Change Act 2008.

Since 2016, and the country's departure from the EU, it has fallen behind, and last year "the UK government made a series of concerning decisions, not least its commitment to invest more in fossil fuels and water down fundamental green policies," as Mike Thornton, CEO of the Energy Saving Trust, points out in a comment piece for us.

He points out that like more than 64 countries, the UK is heading into an election year. "While this brings some uncertainty; it also provides another crucial opportunity for the post-election government to reaffirm its commitment to tackling the dual challenges of climate change and high energy costs," he says.

Circularity is critical to addressing climate change; it is just as important in tackling the nature crisis, writes Marc Palahi, CEO chief executive of the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance, in another comment piece.

“By generating value for Indigenous and local communities, and focusing on more than just tree-planting and carbon sequestration, our approach solves many of the problematic issues with voluntary carbon markets. Our vision is that we should invest in nature, not as an offset for a broken economic system, but to transform our economy.”

Meanwhile, Andrew Herscowitz, executive director of ODI Global in Washington, wrote a comment piece arguing that least-developed countries need more than just aid to pull them out of poverty, but a fair shake in the new clean economy of the future.

Aine Clarke and Rosie Monaghan of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre looked at the results of KnowTheChain’s latest Apparel & Footwear Benchmark, and highlighted how three companies that scored highest – Puma, Lululemon, and Adidas – are striving to change the narrative of rampant labour abuse in the fashion industry.

Human rights was also the subject of a column by former Unilever CEO chief executive Paul Polman, who argued that policymakers, businesses and investors should rally to apply pressure on Azerbaijan, controversial host of this year’s COP29, to announce a plan to pivot away from oil and gas and amend its dismal human rights record, particularly in driving 100,000 Armenians from the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

There was certainly a robust international response when Baku unveiled an all-male COP29 organising committee on 15 January. The campaign group She Changes Climate quickly organiszed a letter to president Ilham Aliyev, signed by 85 women leaders from business, civil society and science. By the end of the week Aliyev had backtracked, including two additional men and 12 women on a revised list.

It's a positive note to end this week’s newsletter. The next one will be in two weeks’ time, when I’ll be mixing some work and holiday in Singapore.