Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Neighbourhoods with racialized and lower-income families suffer more from extreme heat in Canadian cities, climate scientists say, echoing new U.S. research.
Low-income neighborhoods and communities with higher Black, Hispanic and Asian populations experience significantly more urban heat than wealthier and predominantly white neighborhoods, according to researchers from the University of California San Diego.
Disproportionate heat exposure is “due to more built-up neighborhoods, less vegetation, and – to a lesser extent – higher population density,” Susanne Benz, the first author and postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, said in a press release.
Her team used satellite-data and census data to figure out inequalities in a vast majority of populous U.S. counties.
In Canada, studies found populations more at risk for heat-related illness include Indigenous people, newcomers, and lower-income people. Extreme heat has been linked to a host of issues, such as: premature births; lower test scores; decreases in productivity; and, increased risk of heatstroke among children and the elderly.
“It's like a cascade kind of effect at this time this year,” Altaf Arain, director of the McMaster Centre for Climate Change, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview. He wasn’t involved in the study but said “there are a lot of deaths for a lot of people who don’t have the ability to cool down.”
“In a lot of North American cities, there are a lot of minority communities in the poorer neighborhoods, so they are exposed to more heat and … [they often] live in housing where there’s no air conditioning,” said Arain, also a professor at McMaster University’s School of Earth, Environment and Society.
“It is very well established that dense urban areas are warmer as compared to the suburbs… three to four degrees higher,” he said, noting the Government of Canada even has resources and other materials to help public health officials reduce these so-called “heat islands,” where temperatures are disproportionately higher.
Other studies in the U.S. note the effects of extreme heat in cities fall along racial lines, or make heat waves even worse. The latest U.S. findings are especially troubling given how half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, with cities across the world facing the same trend of having hotter heat surface temperatures.
Luna Khirfan, a professor at University of Waterloo’s School of Planning, said urban planners and architects could mitigate urban heat effects by focusing on passive design elements, such as window placement and roofs with garden, trees or other plant life.
“The presence of green spaces, green covers, water features… [can mean] an almost 10-degrees-Celsius difference in temperature,” said Khirfan, whose research touches on community climate change adaptation and the need for increased water spaces and green spaces.
Khirfan’s work is currently focused on racialized and lower-income communities in Toronto being disproportionately hit by flooding, and ways homeowners can mitigate climate-change effects.
“But who can do renovations for their homes?” Khirfan said, explaining that a person’s income directly impacts whether they’re able to guard against problems such as flooding or extreme heat.
Montreal researcher Joanna Eyquem, who examines extreme heat, agrees. She said shoring up more green spaces could increase property values, and therefore plans must ensure they don’t inadvertently price out lower-income and racialized people.
“I really see extreme heat as a compounding factor of inequality,” said Eyquem, managing director of climate-resilient infrastructure at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation in Waterloo.
She notes, while Canada’s racial makeup of Black, Indigenous and racialized people differs from the U.S., there is systemic racial inequality when it comes to disproportionate health outcomes, overrepresentation in jobs outside, and disproportionate exposure to air pollution in cities such as Hamilton, Ont.
Eyquem also noted Canada First Nations, Métis and Inuit populations live in areas in northern Canada, where temperatures are rising as much as three times as much as the rest of the world.
The issue of mitigating extreme heat is so urgent her team is currently putting together a national guidance on practical actions that can be taken.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.