Senior environment officials from the United States, Mexico and Canada meeting in New Orleans on Wednesday were briefed on environmental concerns facing homeland communities, including indoor air pollution in Alaska, protecting freshwater sources from sewage and other pollutants in Mexico, and the impact of climate change already on First Nation villages along the Arctic Circle.
The Commission on Environmental Cooperation acts as a clearinghouse for efforts to coordinate environmental regulation between the three North American nations and sponsors research projects aimed at identifying innovative ways to deal with environmental problems.
A commission grant to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium helped health officials show that replacing traditional wood stoves and kerosene heaters with modern versions dramatically cut particle pollution in substandard homes in indigenous villages.
In 15 households included in the project, 68 percent of the 67 children between the age of 3 and 12 had severe respiratory conditions, said Public Health Service Lt. Cmdr. Troy Ritter, who directed the project.
In many of the homes, the researchers found that residents had plugged air exchanges with clothes to keep out cold air during 50-below-zero winter conditions, since the cost of heating fuel in many of the villages was as high as $10 a gallon, he said. Researchers replaced the vents with modern versions that residents could close with a string, and with carbon monoxide monitors to assure the vents were opened when air quality becomes poor.
While the changes resulted in a 45 percent decrease in carbon dioxide levels, 65 percent decrease in levels of volatile organic carbon compounds and a 49 percent reduction in particulate matter, children in the homes remain at risk, Ritter said. For instance, benzene levels in the homes dropped from 30 times higher than safe levels to 10 times higher than what is considered safe, he said.
Still, preliminary results of the research show fewer visits of children in the homes to health clinics, fewer hospital stays and fewer missed school days, Ritter said.
In villages bordering freshwater Lake Chapala in central Mexico, the problem is reducing the threat of raw sewage discharges into the lake, whose water is used for irrigation and whose fish feed 300,000 people.
Dr. Enrique Cifuentes, a research scientist assigned to the Children?s Environmental Health Specialty Unit at the lake, and Dr. Felipe Lozano, a medical researcher at the University of Guadalajara, oversaw a project that installed dry sanitation toilets and improved washing facilities at local elementary schools, aimed at reducing pollution runoff and reducing infections of the gastrointestinal tract among the students.
The project also taught the youngsters how to use the new toilets and general hygiene.
Mexican Environment Secretary Juan Elvira Quesada said he hopes to see the experiment replicated at other locations in his country.
In a video presentation to the ministers, McGill University geography researcher James Ford said research he?s leading in the Canadian village of Iqaluit shows that climate change already is disrupting the lives of its 7,000 residents.
In the winter months of 2010 and early 2011, warm temperatures meant slow-forming ice in areas where hunters traditionally used the ice as a platform to find their prey, confirmed Iqaluit Mayor Madeleine Redfern, who attended Wednesday?s session.
But she warned the commission that local residents? concerns also must be addressed when national governments address climate change issues.
An example, she said, was the unexpected loss of tourism dollars for her far-north community that resulted from efforts to list the polar bear as an endangered species.
?It?s laudable to use the listing to put pressure on the U.S.? to adopt policies to reduce the effects of climate change, she said. ?However, all that law has achieved is that it actually stopped our communities from having U.S. tourists come for polar bear sports hunts, even though our polar bear population is stable and sustainable.?
Canada Environment Minister Peter Kent said concerns about food supplies also include disruption of transportation to northern villages along roads that lie atop melting permafrost.
?People talk of the specter of a 2 degree temperature rise from global warming as a major problem worldwide,? he said. ?In our Arctic communities, we?re already past 2 degrees.?
The commission is meeting in New Orleans in part because Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is a native of the city.
The commissioners also heard from Dr. Maureen Lichtveld, a researcher at the Tulane School of Public Health, who said her department worked with Louisiana residents in the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill to develop responses that addressed their health concerns with ?solutions that work for them, not what we scientists thought would work for them.?
One result is grant money made available in the aftermath of the spill that will train 40 full-time health workers to be located in clinics in Gulf Coast parishes and counties.
Dillard University sophomore Payton Wilkins briefed the commissioners on efforts the school?s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice is making to educate residents on a variety of environmental issues, including the effects on communities of wetland erosion and the lingering effects of environmental racism, including the disproportionate effect of pollutants on minority and low income communities near refineries.
More information about the commission is available on the web at www.cec.org.
Mark Schleifstein can be reached at mschleifstein@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3327.
Source: http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/07/north_american_environmental_o_1.html
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