In Canada Your Doctor May Tell You to Walk it Off

Forest

Doctors in Canada may soon be prescribing the oldest medicine in the world: walking it off. Thanks to the work of family doctor Dr. Melissa Lem in British Columbia the province will allow a walk in nature to be prescribed by doctors. It’s been proven time and time again that exposure to nature helps with all sorts of medical conditions and recovery times. This initiative to prescribe nature means people can take medical time from work to go for a hike and get a nudge from their doctor to improve their lives.

Dr. Lem wants to bring the program to every province.

Prescriptions for nature became available through this program at the end of last month, and their availability will improve as more health-care practitioners sign up for the prescription packages, which include fact sheets, relevant literature and a unique provider code. This can be done on the program’s website.

In the coming months, Lem intends to expand the program to other provinces and territories, forging partnerships between health-care and parks organizations and sharing the resources she has spent years collecting. Until then, she said health-care providers outside B.C. can sign up in advance and will get their prescription packages when the program reaches them.

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Denmark: No More Oil from the North Sea

wind turbine

The largest oil producer in the European Union has banned all new oil and gas exploration in their territory. Denmark follows France and New Zealand in the banning of new exploration for destructive and climate-altering fossil fuels (who will be next?). The end of oil as a burnable resource is inevitable, and with so many developed nations banning fossil fuel cars and resource extraction the fate of oil is secured. Let’s hope we end the use of non-renewable resources even faster than planned!

Helene Hagel from Greenpeace Denmark described the parliamentary vote as “a watershed moment” that will allow the country to “assert itself as a green frontrunner and inspire other countries to end our dependence on climate-wrecking fossil fuels”.

She said: “This is a huge victory for the climate movement and all the people who have pushed for many years to make it happen.”

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How Pandemic Life is Changing Transportation for the Better

Traffic is the worst and when people start to regularly work from offices we are bound to see an abundance of traffic. Nobody wants this, yet for the last century we’ve been building our cities and suburbs to cause traffic instead of alleviating it. This past year as the need for outdoor space in cities has increased we’ve seen cities reimagine our streets (not in Toronto though, but elsewhere). People are seeing the benefits of designing cities for people who live there instead of designing for car domination of the public realm.

What about traffic though? Inevitably we’ll need to get around again in the future. This is the next step. Most people don’t need a car (they just think they do) for most of their trips, let’s give people multiple options to get around instead of just one!

Micromobility technology, by contrast, is evolving as fast as fruit flies. As Anthony Townsend notes in Ghost Road, the dockless bike operator LimeBike “put no fewer than nine versions of its flagship bike into service during its first year and a half of operation,” while scooter company VeoRide, he notes, can transform a new idea into “on-street hardware in 15 days.”

And yet for all the flurry of micromobility activity, the state of macromobility—which in the US means the car—has changed little, and in some ways is going backward. “The curb weight [of vehicles] is higher than it’s ever been, and these are the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade,” says Greg Lindsay, director of applied research at New Cities, an urbanist think tank. “The OEMs—who don’t seem to be particularly financially healthy—have basically hooked the earth on these extremely expensive vehicles. It’s like the SUV boom has happened against the backdrop of this supposed mobility revolution.”

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More Good News from Web Summit

Web summit panel

Dealing with “fake news” is a challenge for all of us due to the last four years of people in power blatantly telling untruths. Sadly, in regions like Ontario and others, the response to COVID-19 has equally been marred by people in power denying reality. This information environment makes it challenging for journalists to disseminate well-researched and variable information. Today at Web Summit a panel addressed these issues and argued that all of us need to expand our exposure to varied news sources while increasing our critical thinking skills.

This year, news has stepped into the light as a global force for good, communicating the message on how we can stop spreading Covid-19. The fight against fake news has taken on fresh significance in these trying times, but are we winning it?

Another noteworthy presentation looked into the use of hydrogen in the aviation industry. A somewhat secretive startup, Universal Hydrogen, plans to provide the fuel and more to the future of air travel. Of course, the problem with hydrogen is scalability – let’s hope they solve that! They argue that due to the energy requirements for flight that hydrogen is the best solution for decarbonizing the aviation industry (to be clear, they are focussing on large planes not smaller planes which can be fully electric). With the reduction in costs of renewable energy it means that hydrogen production can now happen in a carbon neutral way.

Good News From Web Summit Lisbon Day 1

Web Summit is a conference run in Lisbon about the future of the planet, technology,and business at large. I’m attending it remotely as best I can. The first day isn’t even done and there are two nifty good things already worth sharing:

Ridley Scott launches campaign with The Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI)

The ‘Digital with Purpose’ Movement is open to all. Member organisations are required to make a public pledge to the four universal commitments of the movement: To contribute to the development of the framework, to take part in an open framework evaluation process and to collaborate with others to develop and realise their ambitions to maximise their positive impact on achieving the Paris Agreement and SDGs.

Evercity Announces Smart Sustainable bond

Powered by Parity Substrate blockchain engine, Smart Sustainable Bond Protocol is an open-source software which allows participants to issue and monitor innovative sustainability-linked bonds with adjustable floating impact-linked coupon rate. The main idea of the project is to increase accuracy of impact monitoring and reporting eliminating the risk of greenwashing, as well as to enable fair and transparent impact allocation between different stakeholders engaged in sustainability-related projects. The main operations performed are confirmed by blockchain digital signatures and can be traced publicly. The platform stablecoin EVERUSD can only be used in the operations with bonds, which eliminates the risks of money laundering.