Immediately following the launch of UNICEF’s Report Card, Children’s Healthcare Canada will host a pop-up event focused on climate change and kids. Join Children’s Healthcare Canada as we explore the child health issues related to the environment and climate change and how the system can be better prepared to meet the unique needs of this vulnerable population.

Catherine Clark (broadcaster, emcee, and co-founder of The Honest Talk) will moderate the afternoon complete with three interconnected sessions:

• The Impacts of Climate Change on Children’s Health: What we are seeing now and what we might anticipate in the months/years to come. Dr. Anna Gunz (Paediatric Intensive Care Doctor at Children’s Hospital, London Health Sciences Center)
• Preparing Children’s Health Systems for Natural Disasters and their Impacts (on supply chain, infrastructure damage to the hospital and surrounding community, and patient evacuation). Dr. Mary McCaskill (Director of Medical Services and Clinical Governance at the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network)
• A Closing Panel including Dr. Gunz, Dr. McCaskill and Catherine McKenna (former Federal Minister of the Environment) will address the opportunities to advocate to reduce the impacts of climate change on children and the health systems that support them.

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For two decades, the UNICEF Report Card series has released a report every two years that reveal the state of children and youth across high-income countries. This year’s Report Card, which will be released globally on May 24, takes a new focus on children’s environment. It compares rich countries’ environmental impacts on young people’s health and broader well-being.

Following the release of the report, on May 25 at 12:00 p.m. (ET), join us for an echo event, where three researchers and users of CANUE data will dive deeper into how Canadian children’s exposures to greenspace, playability and air pollution affect their health and wellbeing.

This webinar will explore how each of these exposures impact children’s health, and what could be done to ensure more children have access to greenspace, playable communities and are exposed to less air pollution.

About the speakers:

Emily Gemmell is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health. Rooted in a human rights framework, her research focuses on the ways in which urban form influences child health behaviours and how cities can support health and social connection by integrating kids’ perspectives and needs into the design of neighbourhood spaces. She is currently developing a high-level, evidence-based geospatial metric to assess neighbourhood playability across Canadian urban centers and creating a scalable, computer vision model for assessing child and parent perceptions of neighbourhood environments for outdoor play.

 

 

Ingrid Jarvis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. She holds a BA in Psychology and a BSc in Natural Resources Conservation with Honours. Her CIHR-funded thesis examines how environmental exposures, including green and blue spaces, influence human health and development across the life course among Metro Vancouver residents. Her research focuses on early childhood and adult exposure to surrounding urban environments in relation to a range of health indicators. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach by applying geospatial and epidemiological analyses that combine administrative, survey, and GIS data.

 

 

Eric Lavigne is a Senior Epidemiologist with the Water & Air Quality Bureau of Health Canada and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa. Eric’s research investigates how children’s health is affected by ambient air pollution and climate change. Much of this work is based on epidemiology, biostatistics, and environmental sciences. The research is designed to be policy-relevant and contribute to well-informed decision-making to better protect human health.

 

 

VIDEO AVAILABLE

In 2021, recognizing the health burden of exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5), the World Health Organization cut its guideline for annual average exposure in half. Now 86% of Canadians living in areas that exceed the new WHO guideline. Exposure to air pollution is estimated to cause 7 million deaths every year, and exposure to PM2.5 in particular has been linked with premature death in people with heart or lung disease, nonfatal heart attacks, aggravated asthma, decreased lung function and coughing or difficulty breathing.

Understanding what PM2.5 is, where it comes from, how it’s measured and its effect on health can help public health professionals better manage the health risks it presents to everyone, and health researchers better use relevant and meaningful datasets to understand its health effects.

This webinar will:

• Review the sources and composition of PM2.5, and behaviour that leads to spatial and temporal patterns
• Discuss how satellite-based data is created and used
• Review datasets available through CANUE and the University of Washington in St. Louis, and discuss which sets are recommended for environmental health research

About the speakers:

Jeff Brook is a Scientific Director of the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium, as well as Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto. He has 25 years of experience as an Environment Canada scientist working at the science-policy interface. During this time he spent 15 years as faculty at the University of Toronto, where he was involved in research, lecturing and graduate student training. He is one of Canada’s leading experts in air quality, recognized at all levels of government and academically, including for his substantial contributions in air pollution health research. Dr. Brook has led scientific assessments to inform policy nationally and internationally, and advised multi-stakeholder groups shaping policy. He has led a variety of multi-disciplinary research teams in government, government-academic partnerships and in academia. Recently his efforts have expanded beyond air quality, for example for 8 years he has led the Environmental Working Group of the Canadian Health Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study and co-led the Gene x Environment Research Platform within the AllerGen Network of Centres of Excellence.

 

Aaron van Donkelaar is a Research Associate with the Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group at Washington University in St. Louis. His research combines satellite retrievals with chemical transport model simulations to estimate fine aerosol concentrations around the world. This work is being used to provide valuable insight into exposure-related health effects in regions where these concentrations are not monitored directly, which include some of the most heavily populated and polluted places on earth.

 

 

 

VIDEO AVAILABLE

Whether you live in a walkable community with access to green space or in a car-dependent community close to pollution emitters can have an outsize influence on your health outcomes, and maps closely with income and societal privilege. Addressing these kinds of environmental inequities, if done correctly, can provide health, environmental and economic co-benefits. But, if we want healthier, cleaner and more equitable communities, we will need data-driven solutions. This talk will explain how nationally standardized datasets are fueling a renaissance in environmental health research, how data can be used to identify environmental health inequities in Canadian cities and highlight tools that public health professionals will be able to use to operationalize insights and address inequities in the built environment.

About the presenters:

 

 Jeffrey Brook
Scientific Director and Nominated Principal Investigator

Jeffrey Brook has 25 years of experience as an Environment Canada scientist working at the science-policy interface. During this time he spent 15 years as faculty at the University of Toronto, where he was involved in research, lecturing and graduate student training. He is one of Canada’s leading experts in air quality, recognized at all levels of government and academically, including for his substantial contributions in air pollution health research. Dr. Brook has led scientific assessments to inform policy nationally and internationally, and advised multi-stakeholder groups shaping policy. He has led a variety of multi-disciplinary research teams in government, government-academic partnerships and in academia. Recently his efforts have expanded beyond air quality, for example for 8 years he has led the Environmental Working Group of the Canadian Health Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study and co-led the Gene x Environment Research Platform within the AllerGen Network of Centres of Excellence.

 

Eleanor Setton
Managing Director

As an Adjunct Associate Professor (2008- 2016), Eleanor most recently acted as Co-Director of the Spatial Sciences Research Lab (SSRL) at the University of Victoria. This role involved managing the SSRL grants, staff, and students, and conducting a range of research related to spatial aspects of exposure to environmental pollutants as a PI or Co-PI. Of particular value to CANUE is Dr. Setton’s expertise in population-level environmental exposure assessment; direct experience working with large spatial and tabular datasets related to land use, pollutant emissions and socio-economic characteristics; and developing knowledge translation products about cancer and the environment.

 

Dany Doiron
Data Linkage Lead and Special Projects Manager

Dany Doiron is a Research Associate at the Respiratory Epidemiology and Clinical Research Unit of the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, Canada. Dany has a Masters degree in Public Policy from Simon Fraser University, and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Basel. Prior to joining CANUE, Dany worked with Maelstrom Research, helping epidemiological research consortia in Canada and Europe implement innovative solutions to facilitate multi-centre data integration and co-analysis. Since 2016, Dany provides expertise in linking environmental data to confidential health databases for CANUE. He currently acts as the Chief Operating Officer of the Canadian Cohort of Obstructive Lung Disease (CanCOLD), a large population-based cohort dedicated to better understanding Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Dany’s research focuses on the respiratory health effects of outdoor air pollution exposure.