Founded | 1984[1] |
---|---|
Type | Environmental organization |
Focus | Environmentalism Conservation Ecology |
Location | |
Area served | Canada |
Method | Education, program delivery |
Key people | Suzanne Karajaberlian (Managing Director) [2] Eric Stevenson (President and Chair) [3] |
Revenue | C$3.8 million (2018) [4] |
Website | environmentaldefence.ca |
Environmental Defence (formerly known as the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund) is a Canadian environmental organization, founded in 1984. [1] Its areas of education and research include toxic chemicals, urban sprawl, oil sands, global warming, water quality, and endangered species. [5]
The organization was founded in 1984. [1]
Environmental Defence was part of the founding of the Green Energy Act Alliance. [6] The Green Energy and Economy Act, a first for North America, went into law in Ontario in 2009, and outlined a strategy to improve conservation, increase renewable energy generation, and create green jobs. [7] The Act formed part of the Ontario government's plan to put the province on a path towards reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, while becoming a leader in the emerging global renewable energy sector. [7]
In its 2018 annual report, Environmental Defence stated that, during the year prior, it had raised over C$3.8 million. [4]
Environmental Defence has a number of different areas of focus, including the following: [5]
In 2008, Environmental Defence and The Workgroup for Safe Markets in the US commissioned a report, researched by a lab at the University of Missouri, which stated that plastic baby bottles from a number of manufacturers, including Avent, Evenflo, Dr. Brown's and Disney/First Years, were leaching unsafe levels of bisphenol A (BPA) when heated. This led to dozens of state and national environmental health organizations in Canada and the United States calling for an immediate moratorium on the use of BPA in baby bottles, and other food and beverage containers. [8]
In 2017, Environmental Defence and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report showing how tar sands mining operations in Alberta generated over 250 billion gallons of toxic tailings – a poisonous mixture of water, sand, silt, heavy metals, and other petrochemical waste products – have been stored in toxic lakes that cover an area greater than Manhattan and Boston combined. The NRDC noted that research by the Canadian federal government has determined that toxic tailings are seeping into groundwater and the Athabasca River. Environmental Defence and Daniel T’seleie of the K’ahsho Got’ine Dene First Nation requested the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) – the NAFTA environmental tribunal – to investigate whether the Canadian government was failing to enforce its Fisheries Act by allowing tar sands tailings to leak into Alberta water bodies. [9]
A baby bottle, nursing bottle, or feeding bottle is a bottle with a teat attached to it, which creates the ability to drink via suckling. It is typically used by infants and young children, or if someone cannot drink from a cup, for feeding oneself or being fed. It can also be used to feed non-human mammals.
Oil sands, tar sands, crude bitumen, or bituminous sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. Oil sands are either loose sands or partially consolidated sandstone containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay, and water, soaked with bitumen, a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum.
The Athabasca oil sands, also known as the Athabasca tar sands, are large deposits of bitumen or extremely heavy crude oil that constitute unconventional resources, located in northeastern Alberta, Canada – roughly centred on the boomtown of Fort McMurray. These oil sands, hosted primarily in the McMurray Formation, consist of a mixture of crude bitumen, silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The Athabasca deposit is the largest known reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and the largest of three major oil sands deposits in Alberta, along with the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits.
Nalgene is a brand of plastic products developed originally for laboratory use, including items such as jars, bottles, test tubes, and Petri dishes, that were shatterproof and lighter than glass. The properties of plastic products make them suitable for work with many substances in various temperature ranges.
The Polaris Institute is a Canadian think tank based in Ottawa, Ontario. Its stated goal is "to help empower citizen movements towards democratic social change". It was formed in 1997 in response to its view that citizens were becoming politically disenfranchised in an age of corporate driven globalization.
A water bottle is a container that is used to hold liquids, mainly water, for the purpose of transporting a drink while travelling or while otherwise away from a supply of potable water.
The Sierra Club Canada Foundation (SCCF) is a Canadian environmental organization made up of a national branch and five chapters in Ontario, Atlantic Canada, Québec, the Prairies, and a nation-wide Youth chapter. The organization's mission is to 'empower people to be leaders in protecting, restoring and enjoying healthy and safe ecosystems.'
Syncrude Canada Ltd. is one of the world's largest producers of synthetic crude oil from oil sands and the largest single source producer in Canada. It is located just outside Fort McMurray in the Athabasca Oil Sands, and has a nameplate capacity of 350,000 barrels per day (56,000 m3/d) of oil, equivalent to about 13% of Canada's consumption. It has approximately 5.1 billion barrels (810,000,000 m3) of proven and probable reserves situated on 8 leases over 3 contiguous sites. Including fully realized prospective reserves, current production capacity could be sustained for well over 90 years.
Ecojustice Canada, is a Canadian non-profit environmental law organization that provides funding to lawyers to use litigation to defend and protect the environment. Ecojustice is Canada's largest environmental law charity.
Environmental issues in Canada include impacts of climate change, air and water pollution, mining, logging, and the degradation of natural habitats. As one of the world's significant emitters of greenhouse gasses, Canada has the potential to make contributions to curbing climate change with its environmental policies and conservation efforts.
The Alberta Taciuk process is an above-ground dry thermal retorting technology for extracting oil from oil sands, oil shale and other organics-bearing materials, including oil contaminated soils, sludges and wastes. The technology is named after its inventor William Taciuk and the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority.
As of 2019, renewable energy technologies provide about 17.3% of Canada's total primary energy supply. For electricity renewables provide 67%, with 15% from nuclear and 18% from hydrocarbons.
Respecting Aboriginal Values & Environmental Needs (RAVEN) is a charitable organization that provides financial resources to assist Aboriginal nations within Canada in lawfully forcing industrial development to be reconciled with their traditional ways of life, and in a manner that addresses climate change and other ecological sustainability challenges.
The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) is a Canadian crown corporation responsible for regulating the development of energy resources in Alberta. Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, the AER's mandate under the Responsible Energy Development Act (REDA), passed on 10 December 2012 and proclaimed on 17 June 2013, is to provide safe, efficient, orderly, and environmentally responsible development of energy resources in the province.
Oil sands tailings ponds are engineered dam and dyke systems used to capture oil sand tailings. Oil sand tailings contain a mixture of salts, suspended solids and other dissolvable chemical compounds such as acids, benzene, hydrocarbons residual bitumen, fine silts and water. Large volumes of tailings are a byproduct of bitumen extraction from the oil sands and managing these tailings is one of the most difficult environmental challenges facing the oil sands industry. An October 2021 Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) report said that in 2020 the tailings ponds increased by another 90 million cubic meters and contained 1.36 billion cubic metres of fluids.
The Tar Sands Healing Walk was a 14 km annual prayer walk in demonstration against crude oil extraction in the Athabasca tar sands. It began in 2010, starting just north of the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta at a location known as the Syncrude Loop, and traveling through the heart of the tar sands extraction zone. The walk was led by local Indigenous Elders, who prayed for the healing of the land and to bring attention to the destructive impacts of the tar sands.
Bisphenol A controversy centers on concerns and debates about the biomedical significance of bisphenol A (BPA), which is a precursor to polymers that are used in some consumer products, including some food containers. The concerns began with the hypothesis that BPA is an endocrine disruptor, i.e. it mimics endocrine hormones and thus has the unintended and possibly far-reaching effects on people in physical contact with the chemical.
The Canadian province of Alberta faces a number of environmental issues related to natural resource extraction—including oil and gas industry with its oil sands—endangered species, melting glaciers in banff, floods and droughts, wildfires, and global climate change. While the oil and gas industries generates substantial economic wealth, the Athabasca oil sands, which are situated almost entirely in Alberta, are the "fourth most carbon intensive on the planet behind Algeria, Venezuela and Cameroon" according to an August 8, 2018 article in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's journal Science. This article details some of the environmental issues including past ecological disasters in Alberta and describes some of the efforts at the municipal, provincial and federal level to mitigate the risks and impacts.
Andrew Leach is a Canadian energy and environmental economist and a contributing writer to a number of Canadian news outlets including The Globe and Mail, and Maclean's. His research areas span energy and environmental economics—including topics such as oil sands regulation, clean energy innovations, with a specific focus on climate change policies.
Water pollution in Canada is generally local and regional in water-rich Canada, and most Canadians have "access to sufficient, affordable, and safe drinking water and adequate sanitation." Water pollution in Canada is caused by municipal sewage, urban runoff, industrial pollution and industrial waste, agricultural pollution, inadequate water infrastructure. This is a long-term threat in Canada due to "population growth, economic development, climate change, and scarce fresh water supplies in certain parts of the country."
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