RBC helped arrange US$5.4B of ‘sustainability-linked’ financing for coal mine operator

Story by Redmond Shannon • Apr 4, 2023

GLOBAL NEWS

Royal Bank of Canada is one of many global lenders that want to show that being green isn’t only about the colour of money, but recent revelations about its investment in fossil fuel companies call into question its climate-action bona fides.


A police officer guards the demolition edge of the open pit mine Garzweiler at the village Lützerath near Erkelenz, Germany, on Jan. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)© Provided by Global News

Global News has learned — from financial data firm Refintiv — that those arrangements include involvement in two significant credit lines to energy giant RWE, most recently in the news for its expansion of a coal mine in western Germany.

Data compiled in an analysis by environmental NGOs shows that since 2016, RBC is estimated to be the fifth-largest global financier of fossil fuel projects.

The 2022 Banking on Climate Chaos Report, which uses information from financial data provider Bloomberg LP, also estimated that the Toronto-based bank is the 40th largest funder of coal mining and the 25th largest for coal power generation in that period.

RBC has promised to put $500 billion into so-called sustainable finance investments by 2025.

At RBC’s upcoming annual general meeting in Saskatoon, a bloc of U.S. investors is calling on the bank to be more accountable to its own goals.

On April 5, shareholders will vote on a proposal for the bank to set an “absolute” target for reducing the amount of financing it will provide to the oil and gas and power generation sectors by 2030, although not coal mining, specifically.

“Shareholders applauded these banks when they set net zero goals — but it can’t be all talk,” said New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in a press release in January.

“We expect them to take the steps needed now to reduce emissions on the timeline to which they have committed.”

RBC spokesperson Adam Lister told Global News that it would be improper to comment further on proposals that have yet to be voted on.

An absolute target means RBC would need to establish a concrete amount for reducing these investments, rather than a target that is a percentage of its entire portfolio.

The New York City Comptroller and three of the city’s public retirement funds collectively own around US$28 million in RBC shares.

The bank’s board is recommending that shareholders vote against the proposal, citing instability caused by fluctuating commodity prices, and a desire to recognize the “global need for essential goods and services produced by high-emitting” sectors.

Ever since 195 countries signed the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, banks around the world have wanted to show they’re all about sustainable investment.

Net-zero banking means that any emissions related to investments would be fully offset by initiatives to remove carbon from the atmosphere such as tree planting, purchasing carbon credits or carbon capture technology.

But the Refintiv data, showing RBC’s involvement in the credit lines for Germany-based RWE in 2022, raises complicated questions about how banks reach those climate goals.

The data indicates that the bank is one of 25 investment firms that extended credit lines totalling US$5.4 billion.

RWE operates the controversial Garzweiler coal mine, where in January riot police removed hundreds of protesters, including climate activist Greta Thunberg.

The company is expanding its 35-square-kilometre mine, a site that is used to fuel two coal-fired power stations. According to energy think tank Ember, both RWE plants are in the top three of CO2-emitting sources in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System.

But energy companies like RWE are rarely either dirty or clean. They can be both.

In recent years, RWE has invested heavily in wind and solar energy, becoming one of Europe’s largest producers of renewable energy.

But it also can be demonized as a paleo energy dinosaur, mining and burning coal — the most polluting fossil fuel for over a century.

When Global News asked RWE if it was using any of the money to expand the coal mine, company spokeswoman Regina Wolter said only that the credit lines “are used to finance our green growth and normal working capital needs.”

Since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, RWE’s operations have highlighted tensions at the very core of German politics; the everyday need for energy security versus efforts to reduce emissions.

In response to the stoppage of natural gas from Russia, Germany has reopened some lignite coal-fired power generation plants and prolonged the operation of others.

More broadly, though, any RBC involvement with RWE would also symbolize the nuances of ethical investment.

In 2020, RBC pledged the bank would no longer lend money to new coal-fired power generators, thermal coal mines, or coal mines that require mountaintop removal.

But the wording of that policy allows the bank to continue investing in its existing customers who are expanding coal mines, such as RWE.

“You look at all of the policies that the Canadian banks have in regards to coal, and they have so many loopholes in them that you could drive a coal excavator through those loopholes,” said Richard Brooks, climate finance director with Stand.earth, a Canadian-U.S. environmental NGO that campaigns to protect forests and promotes renewable energy sources.

“We should not be trying to reduce our emissions in Canada while increasing emissions in another country just so we can make some money.”

Earlier this year, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported that HSBC bank contributed US$340 million of the financing to RWE, despite HSBC’s commitment in 2021 to phase out coal financing within nine years from that date.

HSBC confirmed to Global News that it, too, is involved, but wouldn’t say how much it contributed.

According to information from financial data firm Refintiv, RBC is the only Canadian bank among the 25 institutions that helped finance the credit lines.

Other banks include Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and HSBC.

The data does not specify how much RBC contributed to the financing, only that the bank is classified as one of the arranging banks.

“Unfortunately, we do not discuss specific client matters,” RBC said.

Ultimately, unless banks explicitly say they’re financing a green project, there are no assurances about where the money ends up.

Brooks says that once RWE gets the cash, it can do what it wants with it.

“It's completely a black box,” Brooks said. “There's no restrictions put in place to ensure that money is going into a climate solution or renewables project.”

Brooks is among six Canadian activists who lodged a complaint with the Canadian Competition Bureau in 2022 over alleged “deceptive marketing practices” related to RBC’s climate claims. The bureau is now conducting an investigation.

“We disagree with the allegations in the complaint and believe the complaint to be unfounded,” said RBC's Adam Lister.

Sustainability-linked financing

More and more Canadians are opting to put their money into Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investments; a sector estimated to be worth more than $3 billion in Canada.

As part of the ESG boom, the investment arms of banks can opt to finance loans and bonds labelled as: “green,” “social,” “sustainability,” or “sustainability-linked.”

Sustainability-linked financing (SLF) incentivizes companies to meet a set of ESG targets to avoid facing higher interest payments.

According to the Refintiv data, the RWE credit lines involving RBC are classified as SLF.

The financing has three targets, one of which requires the company to increase the share of renewables in its portfolio.

Theoretically, that condition could still allow RWE to increase its fossil fuel emissions, as long as it simultaneously increases its renewables by a larger amount.

What’s more, SLF rules allow RWE to decide its own SLF targets.

Canadian entrepreneur Tariq Fancy is a former head of sustainable investing at the world’s largest asset management firm, BlackRock. Fancy is now a vocal skeptic of SLF transactions.

“If you're your own referee, you're not going to penalize yourself or put yourself in a corner, even if it's in the public interest to reduce exposure to fossil fuels,” Fancy said.

Since leaving his role at BlackRock, Fancy has written about his disillusionment with how the sustainable investment sector currently works, calling it a “dangerous placebo.”

Fancy maintains that investment banks will only move away from fossil fuels when they are forced to do so.

“Economic history has shown us that if we want that to happen, it has to be government regulation. It has to be mandatory compliance rather than voluntary compliance,” Fancy said.

Study: Shutting down nuclear power could increase air pollution

If reactors are retired, polluting energy sources that fill the gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths, researchers estimate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Nearly 20 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power. The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Many of these power plants have run for more than half a century and are approaching the end of their expected lifetimes. 

Policymakers are debating whether to retire the aging reactors or reinforce their structures to continue producing nuclear energy, which many consider a low-carbon alternative to climate-warming coal, oil, and natural gas. 

Now, MIT researchers say there’s another factor to consider in weighing the future of nuclear power: air quality. In addition to being a low carbon-emitting source, nuclear power is relatively clean in terms of the air pollution it generates. Without nuclear power, how would the pattern of air pollution shift, and who would feel its effects?

The MIT team took on these questions in a new study appearing in Nature Energy. They lay out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year. 

Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power’s absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year. 

If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year. 

When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities — a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants — experienced the greatest exposure. 

“This adds one more layer to the environmental health and social impacts equation when you’re thinking about nuclear shutdowns, where the conversation often focuses on local risks due to accidents and mining or long-term climate impacts,” says lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). 

“In the debate over keeping nuclear power plants open, air quality has not been a focus of that discussion,” adds study author Noelle Selin, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and EAPS. “What we found was that air pollution from fossil fuel plants is so damaging, that anything that increases it, such as a nuclear shutdown, is going to have substantial impacts, and for some people more than others.”

The study’s MIT-affiliated co-authors also include Principal Research Scientist Sebastian Eastham and Guillaume Chossière SM ’17, PhD ’20, along with Alan Jenn of the University of California at Davis. 

Future phase-outs

When nuclear power plants have closed in the past, fossil fuel use increased in response. In 1985, the closure of reactors in Tennessee Valley prompted a spike in coal use, while the 2012 shutdown of a plant in California led to an increase in natural gas. In Germany, where nuclear power has almost completely been phased out, coal-fired power increased initially to fill the gap. 

Noting these trends, the MIT team wondered how the U.S. energy grid would respond if nuclear power were completely phased out. 

“We wanted to think about what future changes were expected in the energy grid,” Freese says. “We knew that coal use was declining, and there was a lot of work already looking at the impact of what that would have on air quality. But no one had looked at air quality and nuclear power, which we also noticed was on the decline.” 

In the new study, the team used an energy grid dispatch model developed by Jenn to assess how the U.S. energy system would respond to a shutdown of nuclear power. The model simulates the production of every power plant in the country and runs continuously to estimate, hour by hour, the energy demands in 64 regions across the country. 

Much like the way the actual energy market operates, the model chooses to turn a plant’s production up or down based on cost: Plants producing the cheapest energy at any given time are given priority to supply the grid over more costly energy sources. 

The team fed the model available data on each plant’s changing emissions and energy costs throughout an entire year. They then ran the model under different scenarios, including: an energy grid with no nuclear power, a baseline grid similar to today’s that includes nuclear power, and a grid with no nuclear power that also incorporates the additional renewable sources that are expected to be added by 2030. 

They combined each simulation with an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate how each plant’s various emissions travel around the country and to overlay these tracks onto maps of population density. For populations in the path of pollution, they calculated the risk of premature death based on their degree of exposure. 

System response

Their analysis showed a clear pattern: Without nuclear power, air pollution worsened in general, mainly affecting regions in the East Coast, where nuclear power plants are mostly concentrated. Without those plants, the team observed an uptick in production from coal and gas plants, resulting in 5,200 pollution-related deaths across the country, compared to the baseline scenario. 

They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power’s absence. The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century. 

“We need to be thoughtful about how we’re retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system,” Freese says. “Shutting down something that doesn’t have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond.” 

“This might mean that we need to deploy even more renewables, in order to fill the hole left by nuclear, which is essentially a zero-emissions energy source,” Selin adds. “Otherwise we will have a reduction in air quality that we weren’t necessarily counting on.” 

This study was supported, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

###

Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office

---

JOURNAL

Nature Energy

ARTICLE TITLE

“Nuclear Power Generation Phaseouts Redistribute U.S. Air Quality and Climate Related Mortality Risk”

Study shows involuntary displacement of people experiencing homelessness may cause significant spikes in mortality, overdoses and hospitalizations

New model suggests encampment sweeps, bans and move-along-orders could contribute to 15-25% of deaths in this population over 10 years

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ANSCHUTZ MEDICAL CAMPUS

 

VIDEO: JOSH BAROCAS, MD, DISCUSSES THE RESEARCH BEHIND FINDING THAT UP TO 25% OF UNHOUSED PEOPLE WHO USE DRUGS COULD DIE IN 10 YEARS DUE TO INVOLUNTARY DISPLACEMENT POLICIES INCLUDING CAMPING BANS AND SWEEPS. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ANSCHUTZ MEDICAL CAMPUS

AURORA, Colo. (April 10, 2023) – Involuntary displacement of people experiencing homelessness will likely lead to a substantial increase in morbidity and mortality over a 10-year period.

In a study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers say practices such as encampment sweeps, bans, move-along-orders and cleanups that forcibly relocate individuals away from essential services will lead to substantial increases in overdose deaths, life threatening infections and hospitalizations.

In coordination with the National Healthcare for Homeless Council, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Foundation of the CDC, a multidisciplinary group of researchers developed a simulation model projecting the long-term health effects of involuntary displacement of people experiencing homelessness who inject drugs using data from 23 U.S. cities. They used city- and national-level data to closely model what the population looks like in real life including their overdose risk and mortality. They then modeled two scenarios over a 10-year time period: no continual displacement and continual involuntary displacement of this population.

In hundreds of different projections, the model showed no feasible scenario, in any city, where continual involuntary displacement improves health outcomes. Instead, the practice would likely result in a significant increase in morbidity, mortality and a shortened life expectancy, the study said.

“Our research shows that these widespread practices that forcibly displace people are clearly impacting the health of this population, particularly when it comes to increasing their overdose risk, so much so that it actually decreases the life expectancy of the entire population,” says Josh Barocas, MD, associate professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and corresponding author. “Modeling studies like ours give us a sense of whether we’re headed in the right or wrong direction. Our study showed that displacement could directly result in a quarter of deaths of this population. This tell us that this practice is taking us in the wrong direction if we want to solve issues around homelessness and substance use disorders.” 

Researchers also found displacement increased overdose deaths, hospitalizations, injection-related infections and hindered access to medications for opioid use disorder along with other detrimental impacts. 

“It’s estimated that more than 500,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the U.S., and understanding the toll practices such as camping bans and sweeps take on such a substantial population is critical to emphasizing the need for care and services versus literally being swept aside,” says Barocas. “We hope these results inform future policies that actually mitigate the long-term health consequences in this population before it’s too late.” 

 

About the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is a world-class medical destination at the forefront of transformative science, medicine, education and patient care. The campus encompasses the University of Colorado health professional schools, more than 60 centers and institutes, and two nationally ranked independent hospitals - UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital and Children's Hospital Colorado - that treat more than two million adult and pediatric patients each year. Innovative, interconnected and highly collaborative, the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus delivers life-changing treatments, patient care and professional training and conducts world-renowned research fueled by over $690 million in research grants. For more information, visit www.cuanschutz.edu.

 

---

JOURNAL

JAMA

DOI

10.1001/jama.2023.4800 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Population-Level Health Effects of Involuntary Displacement of People Experiencing Unsheltered Homelessness Who Inject Drugs in US Cities

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Apr-2023

Health effects of involuntary displacement of homeless individuals who inject drugs

JAMA

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JAMA NETWORK

About The Study: This simulation modeling study of 23 U.S. cities projects that involuntary displacement of people experiencing homelessness who inject drugs may yield substantial increases in morbidity and mortality over a 10-year period. Involuntary displacement is estimated to worsen overdose and hospitalizations, decrease initiations of medications for opioid use disorder, and contribute to deaths. These findings have implications for the practice of involuntary displacement, as well as policies such as access to housing and supportive services, that could mitigate these harms. 

Authors: Joshua A. Barocas, M.D., of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, is the corresponding author.

(doi:10.1001/jama.2023.4800)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

#  #  #

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/10.1001/jama.2023.4800?guestAccessKey=f321ceca-78d6-4d55-bcc5-e7a775ce1152&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=041023

---

JOURNAL

JAMA

Hooper creating public database of slaving voyages across the Indian Ocean and Asia

Grant and Award Announcement

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

Jane Hooper, Associate Professor, History, received funding for the project: "Global Passages: Creating a Public Database of Slaving Voyages across the Indian Ocean and Asia."

Hooper, along with three other scholars, has received a three-year digital production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a major expansion of the open access SlaveVoyages website, available online at https://www.slavevoyages.org. 

The primary investigators will create an Indian Ocean and Asia (IOA) database of voyages that transported enslaved African, Malagasy, Middle Eastern, Indian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian men, women, and children within and beyond the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and 1940 as an integral part of the SlaveVoyages website. The database will incorporate the voyage datasets they have created over the last 15 years into this new open-source and fully searchable online database that will also include contributions from other internationally based scholars and researchers.  

This important new addition to the website will emphasize that the transoceanic commerce in slave labor was a truly global phenomenon that involved Arab/Swahili, Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian as well as European and American vessels. Research has demonstrated that the transoceanic slave trade in the Indian Ocean began centuries before it did in the Atlantic and continued into the mid-twentieth century, decades after the transatlantic trade’s demise in the mid-1860s. The investigators will also develop essays, lesson plans, and interactive maps to accompany the database.

The project will receive $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project; out of this funding, Hooper will receive $65,544 from Rice University on a subaward to support research and production of the database. Funding began in March 2023 and will end in late Feb. 2026.

###

About George Mason University

George Mason University is Virginia's largest public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., Mason enrolls 38,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. Mason has grown rapidly over the last half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity and commitment to accessibility. Learn more at http://www.gmu.edu.

Early crop plants were more easily ‘tamed’

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

 

IMAGE: ERECT KNOTWEED view more 

CREDIT: NATALIE MUELLER / WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

The story of how ancient wolves came to claim a place near the campfire as humanity’s best friend is a familiar tale (even if scientists are still working out some of the specifics). In order to be domesticated, a wild animal must be tamable — capable of living in close proximity to people without exhibiting dangerous aggression or debilitating fear. Taming was the necessary first step in animal domestication, and it is widely known that some animals are easier to tame than others.

But did humans also favor certain wild plants for domestication because they were more easily “tamed”? Research from Washington University in St. Louis calls for a reappraisal of the process of plant domestication, based on almost a decade of observations and experiments. The behavior of erect knotweed, a buckwheat relative, has WashU paleoethnobotanists completely reassessing our understanding of plant domestication.

“We have no equivalent term for tameness in plants,” said Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. “But plants are capable of responding to people. They have a developmental capacity to be tamed.”

Her work with early indigenous North American crops shows that some wild plants respond quickly to clearing, fertilizing, weeding or thinning. Plants that respond in ways that make cultivation easier or more productive could be considered more easily tamed than those that cannot.

“If plants responded rapidly in ways that were beneficial to early cultivators — for example by producing higher yields, larger seeds, seeds that were easier to sprout, or a second crop in a single growing season — this would have encouraged humans to continue investing in the co-evolutionary relationship,” she said.

This capacity to express different traits and characteristics in response to the environment is called plasticity, and not all species are equally plastic.

“Some plants respond quickly and obviously to cultivation and care,” Mueller said. “I think ancient people would have noticed that they could double their yields just by thinning out dense stands of plants. This is one of the simplest and most common gardening techniques, but it has many important effects on the development of plants.”

Research from Washington University in St. Louis calls for a reappraisal of the process of plant domestication, based on almost a decade of observations and experiments. The behavior of erect knotweed, a buckwheat relative pictured here, has WashU paleoethnobotanists completely reassessing our understanding of plant domestication.

CREDIT

Natalie Mueller / Washington University in St. Louis

What would an early farmer do?

Mueller’s study, published April 7 in PLOS ONE, focuses on work with a plant called erect knotweed, a member of the buckwheat family that was domesticated by indigenous farmers in eastern North America. The domesticated sub-species is now extinct; humans don’t eat it anymore. But Mueller and others have previously uncovered caches of seeds stored in caves, charred plant remnants in ancient hearths, and even the seeds of erect knotweed in human feces, clear evidence that this species was once consumed as a staple food.

Mueller, who studies lost crops, has spent years growing erect knotweed and other crop progenitors in experimental gardens, including at Washington University’s environmental field station, Tyson Research Center. She hasn’t always been successful with growing the plants she collects in the wild. In that way, Mueller can relate to the early farmers who similarly experimented with plants to discover their potential.

Her efforts have often been stymied by seed dormancy, a common feature among wild plants.

Unlike seeds you buy at the garden store, the seeds of most wild plants will not germinate if you simply sprinkle some water on them. Their requirements for germination are diverse and shaped by their evolutionary history. For example, if a plant has evolved in a place with a winter, like the Midwest, its seeds may not germinate unless they experience a long cold period. This prevents them from germinating too soon in the wild — they are waiting for spring. Domesticated plants have lost their diverse germination requirements.

The loss of germination inhibitors has presented a paradox to theorists of domestication. Many of the selective pressures that could have favored the evolution of this trait derive from planting seeds. But why would ancient people have started planting seeds if none of them germinated?

With erect knotweed, Mueller experienced a breakthrough of sorts. Based on four seasons of observations, Mueller determined that growing wild plants in the low-density conditions typical of a cultivated garden (i.e. spaced out and weeded) triggers plants to produce seeds that germinate more easily. This makes the harvests easier to plant successfully the next time around, eliminating a key barrier to further selection.

“Our results show that erect knotweed grown in low-density agroecosystems spontaneously ‘act domesticated’ in a single growing season, before any selection has occurred,” Mueller said.

Think of it as the plant equivalent to that first wolf who, though still a wild animal, sat down with its human friend around the fire. This is a behavioral shift, rather than an evolutionary one, but it allows new evolutionary pathways to open up.

A role for plant behavior

Mueller believes there is a bias in domestication studies toward viewing this changeability, or plasticity, as noise that is getting in the way of attempts to explain evolutionary change. Instead, this paper argues that we need to understand the development and behavior of wild crop relatives in order to explain the evolutionary process of domestication.

“Because we lack the practical experience with crop progenitors that ancient people had, these effects of the environment on plant development have gone mostly unnoticed and understudied,” Mueller said.

Her findings could have applications for developing new food crops: there is no reason why we have to be limited to the plants that our ancestors domesticated thousands of years ago.

Some researchers have been calling for de novo domestication — selecting wild plants with desirable characteristics and intentionally domesticating them. It may make sense to start looking to wild plants that are easily tamed as potential crops that could be developed for the future, Mueller said.

This paper also contributes to a growing awareness that plants are responsive and communicative beings. Though this idea is cutting-edge and hotly debated in biology and ecology, it is widespread in indigenous North American philosophies and probably would have been held by the people who domesticated erect knotweed and other plants thousands of years ago.

Recent research has shown how plants warn relatives about herbivores using chemical signaling, share resources through mycorrhizal networks and even emit noises when they are injured or stressed.

“You can’t explain plant domestication if you only consider the behaviors of humans, because domestication is the result of reciprocal relationships between multiple species that are all capable of responding to each other,” Mueller said.

---

JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0284136 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The taming of the weed: Developmental plasticity facilitated plant domestication

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Apr-2023

Vaccine hesitancy has become a nationwide issue: What can science do about it?

Medical University of South Carolina researchers use a national survey to understand South Carolina’s COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

 

IMAGE: VIALS OF COVID-19 VACCINES AND SYRINGES. view more 

CREDIT: MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, SARAH PACK.

South Carolina residents were more hesitant than Americans as a whole to receive the COVID-19 vaccine during the fall of 2020, report researchers in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in the Journal of Psychiatry Research. The MUSC study showed that the two most important factors contributing to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy were low levels of confidence in public health scientists and low levels of collective responsibility to prevent COVID. Postdoctoral fellow Caitlin Rancher, Ph.D., and Dean G. Kilpatrick, Ph.D., director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, led the study.

The first step in combating vaccine hesitancy is to figure out why people are unwilling to receive vaccines, said Rancher. This will inform scientists on how to better educate the public on why these vaccines are beneficial. MUSC researchers like Rancher and Kilpatrick are stepping up to the plate and taking this challenge head on.

“It's really understanding the factors that are contributing to hesitancy,” said Rancher. “It's critical because it can help us to inform public health with targeted and effective response campaigns.”

To understand these factors better, the researchers surveyed a national sample of 1,450 people, excluding South Carolinians, and a state sample of 784 South Carolinians. To select recipients, they drew on the MFour Mobile Research Panel, which includes approximately 2 million people reflective of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. To participate in the survey, recipients had to have a smartphone and register for MFour’s Surveys On The Go app.

“The MFour Mobile Research Panel has several advantages for this type of research due to its large size and widespread coverage of South Carolina and the U.S. and the fact that the panel is constructed to closely match the demographic characteristics of the U.S. population,” said Kilpatrick.

The survey asked recipients to gauge their degrees of trust in the COVID-19 vaccine and their intentions to receive it. Researchers assessed several of these survey questions with validated multi-item measures known as the 5Cs: 

Confidence: Do I trust the science and my provider?

Complacency: Is this vaccine necessary to my health?

Constraints: Is the vaccine affordable and accessible?

Risk Calculation: What is the risk of me getting sick with this disease?

Collective Responsibility: Will getting this vaccine help others in the community?

The MUSC study found that two components of the 5C model were the driving factors for the increased hesitancy in South Carolina: confidence in science and shared collective responsibility. South Carolina residents reported lower confidence in their providers and the science backing the vaccine. Residents also felt less collective responsibility or an ethical obligation to get vaccinated to protect their community.

Focusing on these components of vaccine hesitancy will allow researchers to do a better job of educating patients and communities in vaccine science and the benefits of certain shots, said Angela Moreland-Johnson, Ph.D., a co-author of the study and an assistant professor at MUSC in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She believes a way to overcome vaccine hesitancy is to educate health professionals to help patients to understand the science and the benefits of the vaccine.

“The science and the medicine don't do a whole lot of good if people don't trust in them and trust what's being told and given to them,” she said.

Although vaccine hesitancy is not new, the pandemic exacerbated the situation. And as the survey brought to light, distrust in the scientific community has grown markedly, leading to reluctance by some to accept not only the COVID-19 vaccine but even standard childhood shots.

“Globally, we're really seeing that vaccine hesitancy is contributing to a rise in cases and mortality from diseases that we thought we had a handle on,” said Rancher. “For example, here, even in the U.S., in 2019, there were several measles outbreaks, where governors were declaring states of emergency.”

The key takeaway from this study was that the researchers were able to determine the main drivers of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in South Carolina using data from the MFour Mobile Research Panel and applying the 5C model.

The MUSC researchers think that by understanding which factors are preventing people from receiving vaccines, it will allow scientists and health providers to tailor vaccine and public-education efforts specifically for those target populations. They hope that better education will lead to less vaccine hesitancy and leave the state better positioned for future outbreaks or pandemics.

# # #

About MUSC

Founded in 1824 in Charleston, MUSC is the state’s only comprehensive academic health system, with a unique mission to preserve and optimize human life in South Carolina through education, research and patient care. Each year, MUSC educates more than 3,000 students in six colleges – Dental Medicine, Graduate Studies, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy – and trains more than 850 residents and fellows in its health system. MUSC brought in more than $297.8 million in research funds in fiscal year 2022, leading the state overall in research funding. For information on academic programs, visit musc.edu.

As the health care system of the Medical University of South Carolina, MUSC Health is dedicated to delivering the highest quality and safest patient care while educating and training generations of outstanding health care providers and leaders to serve the people of South Carolina and beyond. Patient care is provided at 14 hospitals with approximately 2,500 beds and five additional hospital locations in development, more than 350 telehealth sites and connectivity to patients’ homes, and nearly 750 care locations situated in all regions of South Carolina. In 2022, for the eighth consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report named MUSC Health the No. 1 hospital in South Carolina. To learn more about clinical patient services, visit muschealth.org.

MUSC and its affiliates have collective annual budgets of $5.1 billion. The nearly 25,000 MUSC team members include world-class faculty, physicians, specialty providers, scientists, students, affiliates and care team members who deliver groundbreaking education, research and patient care.

---

JOURNAL

Journal of Psychiatric Research

DOI

10.1016/j.jpsychires.2023.02.018 

Those who avoided COVID-19 precautions early in the pandemic are more likely to buy firearms

Rutgers researchers analyze how different communities view, manage and respond to risk

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

People who avoid COVID-19 precautions to prevent illness are more likely to purchase firearms – a pattern of behavior most common among moderate and conservative individuals, according to a Rutgers study.

The researchers surveyed a sample of 6,404 adults from three states: Minnesota, Mississippi and New Jersey. The survey was conducted in early 2021, before COVID-19 vaccines were widespread, and participants were asked about their intent to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, how often they wear masks in public, how regularly they receive a flu vaccine, how they characterize their political beliefs and who they voted for in the 2020 Presidential election.

The researchers then used a statistical method called latent class analysis to see if these behaviors and intents cluster together in a way that creates distinct groups and whether such groups differ in their firearm purchasing behaviors.

Their study appears in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

The researchers considered each of these behaviors as defensive behaviors aimed to keep individuals and their communities safe from illness or physical attacks.

The analysis indicated there were four groups based upon these defensive behaviors and political beliefs. The first group, marked by liberal political views, engaged in many defensive behaviors to avoid illness and more than 98 percent voted for Joe Biden. The second group, marked by moderate political views, engaged in very few defensive behaviors to avoid illness and more than 73 percent voted for Joe Biden. The third group, marked by conservative political beliefs, engaged in very few defensive behaviors to avoid illness and more than 90 percent voted for Donald Trump. In the fourth group, also marked by conservative political beliefs, individuals engaged in many defensive behaviors to avoid illness and more than 73 percent voted for Donald Trump.

The groups that engaged in few behaviors to avoid illness were more likely to have purchased firearms since March 2020, when a surge in firearm sales took hold nationwide. Those same groups also endorsed less faith that scientists act in the best interests of the public.

“These finding highlight that different communities view and respond to risk differently and that they trust different sources to provide them with information on how to manage that risk,” said Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “Some individuals saw very little risk from illness, even early in the pandemic, and generally avoided precautions like mask wearing and vaccines that could have protected them and their communities.

These same communities, however, appeared to have concerns about being harmed by other people and, as a result, engaged in a behavior they viewed as capable of keeping them safe in that domain: firearm purchasing, Anestis said.

“Given their lower levels of faith in the intentions of scientists, this skewed perception of risk might be driven in part by a tendency to receive information from sources that are not informed by data,” he said.

The authors noted that although these individuals were less likely to have purchased firearms since 2020, the groups marked by engaging in many defensive behaviors to avoid illness had a higher percentage of members who became first time firearm owners since March 2020.

“It might be that the chaos of 2020 and 2021 caused some individuals who otherwise would not have become firearm owners to see risk differently and purchase a firearm for the first time,” Anestis said. “We need to be aware of the changing demographics of firearm ownership, because risk might be different in those communities.”

The authors said the two conservative groups were noteworthy in one other way: The conservative group that endorsed engaging in more defensive behaviors to avoid illness endorsed more conservative beliefs than the conservative group that engaged in few defensive behaviors to avoid illness, but they were substantially less likely to have voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

---

JOURNAL

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

DOI

10.1521/jscp.2023.42.2.160 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Defensive Behaviors During COVID-19 and the 2020–2021 Firearm Purchasing Surge: A Latent Class Analysis

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Apr-2023