Governments who push popular climate policies can be punished at the ballot box by local and vocal minorities

While the majority of the public typically supports environmental policies, if the costs fall on local groups with projects in their backyards, they often resist. In new research that uses Ontario, Canada as a case study, Leah C. Stokes examines how small groups are able to mobilize politically to oppose the location of new wind turbines. She finds that the provincial governing party responsible for introducing wind energy policy lost between 4 and 10 percent of their vote share in areas where turbines were located. She argues that policymakers need to engage citizens more during renewable energy project development to build their support and to minimize potential political barriers

The Mercury Game: Evaluating a Negotiation Simulation that Teaches Students about Science–Policy Interactions

Environmental negotiations and policy decisions take place at the science–policy interface. While this is well known in academic literature, it is often difficult to convey how science and policy interact to students in environmental studies and sciences courses. We argue that negotiation simulations, as an experiential learning tool, are one effective way to teach students about how science and policy interact in decision-making. We developed a negotiation simulation, called the Mercury Game, based on the global mercury treaty negotiations. To evaluate the game, we conducted surveys before and after the game was played in university classrooms across North America. For science students, the simulation communicates how politics and economics affect environmental negotiations. For environmental studies and policy students, the mercury simulation demonstrates how scientific uncertainty can affect decision-making. Using the mercury game as an education tool allows students to learn about complex interactions between science and society and develop communication skills.This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (#1053648)

Splitting the South: China and India’s Divergence in International Environmental Negotiations

International environmental negotiations often involve conflicts between developed and developing countries. However, considering environmental cooperation in a North-South dichotomy obscures important variation within the Global South, particularly as emerging economies become more important politically, economically, and environmentally. This article examines change in the Southern coalition in environmental negotiations, using the recently concluded Minamata Convention on Mercury as its primary case. Focusing on India and China, we argue that three key factors explain divergence in their positions as the negotiations progressed: domestic resources and regulatory politics, development constraints, and domestic scientific and technological capacity. We conclude that the intersection between scientific and technological development and domestic policy is of increasing importance in shaping emerging economies’ engagement in international environmental negotiations. We also discuss how this divergence is affecting international environmental cooperation on other issues, including the ozone and climate negotiations

Evaluering av sammenheng mellom tiltak

While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change's causes varies geographically, with more people attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels

Accelerating the timeline for climate action in California

The climate emergency increasingly threatens our communities, ecosystems, food production, health, and economy. It disproportionately impacts lower income communities, communities of color, and the elderly. Assessments since the 2018 IPCC 1.5 Celsius report show that current national and sub-national commitments and actions are insufficient. Fortunately, a suite of solutions exists now to mitigate the climate crisis if we initiate and sustain actions today. California, which has a strong set of current targets in place and is home to clean energy and high technology innovation, has fallen behind in its climate ambition compared to a number of major governments. California, a catalyst for climate action globally, can and should ramp up its leadership by aligning its climate goals with the most recent science, coordinating actions to make 2030 a point of significant accomplishment. This entails dramatically accelerating its carbon neutrality and net-negative emissions goal from 2045 to 2030, including advancing clean energy and clean transportation standards, and accelerating nature-based solutions on natural and working lands. It also means changing its current greenhouse gas reduction goals both in the percentage and the timing: cutting emissions by 80 percent (instead of 40 percent) below 1990 levels much closer to 2030 than 2050. These actions will enable California to save lives, benefit underserved and frontline communities, and save trillions of dollars. This rededication takes heed of the latest science, accelerating equitable, job-creating climate policies. While there are significant challenges to achieving these goals, California can establish policy now that will unleash innovation and channel market forces, as has happened with solar, and catalyze positive upward-scaling tipping points for accelerated global climate action.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Discovery and Annotation of Two Phages that Infect Microbacterium foliorum: Tedro and Bajuniper

We isolated and purified Tedro and BAjuniper which infect the host Microbacterium foliorium. Tedro is a lytic, cluster EF phage isolated from soil collected in Hawarden, Iowa. Its genome is 56,197 bp long, circularly permuted, and includes 83 protein-coding genes and no tRNA genes. We are examining two of Tedro’s genes, genes 56 and 57, both of which are predicted to encode a DnaE-like DNA polymerase III (alpha) in more detail. Tedro_57 is twice as large as Tedro_56 so we are using additional bioinformatic tools to understand these genes. BAjuniper was isolated from soil collected in a garden in Orange City, Iowa. Its genome is 41,985 bp long. It was assigned to cluster EB. BAjuniper’s genome includes one tRNA gene and we will finalize BAjuniper’s annotation shortly

The role of Allee effect in modelling post resection recurrence of glioblastoma

Resection of the bulk of a tumour often cannot eliminate all cancer cells, due to their infiltration into the surrounding healthy tissue. This may lead to recurrence of the tumour at a later time. We use a reaction-diffusion equation based model of tumour growth to investigate how the invasion front is delayed by resection, and how this depends on the density and behaviour of the remaining cancer cells. We show that the delay time is highly sensitive to qualitative details of the proliferation dynamics of the cancer cell population. The typically assumed logistic type proliferation leads to unrealistic results, predicting immediate recurrence. We find that in glioblastoma cell cultures the cell proliferation rate is an increasing function of the density at small cell densities. Our analysis suggests that cooperative behaviour of cancer cells, analogous to the Allee effect in ecology, can play a critical role in determining the time until tumour recurrence

2017 Research & Innovation Day Program

A one day showcase of applied research, social innovation, scholarship projects and activities.https://first.fanshawec.ca/cri_cripublications/1004/thumbnail.jp