Monday, November 29, 2021

As COVID-19 strains nurses, Singh says feds must ease barriers for those trained abroad

By Amanda Connolly Global News
Posted November 28, 2021 


WATCH ABOVE: Cost of housing biggest crisis outside the pandemic: Singh

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says Ottawa must make it easier for nurses trained abroad to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 in Canada, as the virus continues to strain health-care workers and the new Omicron variant fuels new concerns about the ongoing evolution of the virus.

In an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Singh said the government should create a work permit for nurses who qualify to come to Canada under immigration pathways prioritizing health-care workers, but whose applications for permanent residency face continued delays.

“We’re in a massive shortage of health-care workers, particularly nurses. But there are thousands of nurses who are trained internationally who are in Canada, and the only barrier to them actually being able to work is their immigration status,” said Singh.

“One small change to their immigration status would allow them to practise here and provide help to Canadians who need desperately their work.”

Singh said the wait for their permanent residency means many nurses who have passed licensing exams to practise in Canada are not able to do so, at a time when health-care workers are burning out.

2:06 OMA: ongoing physician burnout exacerbated by the pandemic – Aug 22, 2021


The pandemic has driven rising rates of burnout and exhaustion among Canadian health-care workers, including doctors, nurses and mental health workers. All have faced unprecedented strains and demands over the course of the last 19 months as they fought on the front lines of the pandemic.

Last week, a union survey of B.C. nurses found 35 per cent are considering quitting because of the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, which experts say amplified chronic issues around understaffing.


2:10 COVID-19: How the Omicron variant could affect hospitalization rates in Canada

The issue of burnout in nurses is not unique to that province, though, or to Canada. It’s emerged as one of the major shadow pandemics of the COVID-19 era as successive waves of the virus have pummelled health-care systems around the world.

Part of the challenge, though, has been the length and grind of the pandemic, many have said, pointing to the broad social support for doctors and nurses in the early days of COVID-19 compared with the vitriol and threats by anti-vaccine extremists increasingly targeting many of them.

The B.C. Nurses Union has said it would need roughly 24,000 new nurses in that province alone by 2029 to ease the shortage, but nursing schools in Canada have also faced challenges in scaling up their programs to train greater numbers of students to keep up with demand.

READ MORE: ‘You just felt chronically tired’ — COVID-19 pandemic burning out Canadian nurses

And that demand is not letting up as cases continue to ebb and flow across the country.

Last week, public health officials around the world also raised concerns about a new variant dubbed Omicron that was first identified by researchers in South Africa.

Multiple countries quickly slapped travel restrictions into place, but the variant has been detected in Hong Kong and Belgium in addition to a spike in cases in South Africa.

There are not yet any confirmed cases of the variant in Canada, chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said on Friday. But it will take days or weeks until experts have a clear picture of the threat the variant may pose to countries, even those with highly vaccinated populations.

“Due to the potential for increased transmissibility and the possibility of increased resistance to vaccine-induced protection, we are concerned about this new variant and closely monitoring the evolving situation,” Tam said.

Canada desperately needs nurses. So why does it take so long for internationally trained nurses to get licensed?


Patty Winsa
Data Reporter
Sunday, November 28, 2021

Canadian Lisa Coneybeare endured tragedy every day as a nurse on a COVID-19 floor in a Los Angeles hospital and after months of seeing patient after patient die, she decided she needed to come back to Ontario, where she was born, and help fight the pandemic here.

“I’d worked COVID for five or six months and thought, ‘Canada is going to need me,’ ” said Coneybeare, who has a master’s in clinical nursing and another as a nurse practitioner from both UCLA and California State University in Los Angeles.

What she was not prepared for, however, is that she would still be in the U.S. as Canada endured the second and third, and now a fourth wave of the pandemic, which has magnified this country’s shortage of registered nurses.

Hundreds of potential foreign-trained nurses who want to work in Canada, including Coneybeare, have been caught in a backlog at the National Nursing Assessment Service, a Canadian not-for-profit which vets and authenticates their academic credentials.

The delay is due to an “unusually high volume of applications” to the assessment service, said its executive director Gayle Waxman, in an email. “This has caused a delay in reviewing a minority of applications. NNAS has notified the applicants whose applications are impacted.

“We of course apologize for the delay and anticipate that it will be resolved in the near future,” said Waxman.

The assessment service is a Canadian non-profit that contracts the work out to an American company. The service received nearly 7,000 applications from foreign-educated nurses wanting to work here in the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2021, an 11 per cent increase over the year before, said Waxman.

But the assessment is only one of numerous hurdles foreign applicants face when they try to get licensed by a provincial college, with most of them also pursuing permanent residency through Canadian immigration in a separate, unrelated process.

The result, experts say, is that thousands of potential nurses come to Canada as live-in caregivers or permanent residents hoping to realize their dreams.

But they end up working as personal support workers or caregivers to support their family because of the length of time it takes to get licensed, the fees associated with it, or the cost of and access to bridging programs at school to upgrade their education.

“Once they get here, they face a disjointed and expensive journey as they attempt to get licensed to practise,” said Joan Atlin, director of strategy, policy and research for World Education Services. “Many abandon the attempt at some point along the way and our health-care system loses their skills.

“The players responsible for immigration, assessment, bridging, and licensure need to be tied together into a coherent system,” she said.

World Education Services, a non-profit that helps international students, immigrants and refugees realize their career goals in the U.S. and Canada, estimates it can cost up to $16,000 for a foreign-trained nurse to get licensed here, which includes expenses such as the NNAS academic assessment, the nursing exam, application fees to a provincial nursing college and academic bridging programs.

The education service was one of 50 organizations that signed an open letter during the federal election calling for a national strategy to address the barriers to licensing faced by internationally educated health professionals

“Right now, we don’t even have an accurate picture of how many health-care professionals arrive in Canada as students, permanent residents, or temporary workers — including caregivers — every year,” said Atlin.

Data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada shows that between 2015 and 2021 no temporary foreign workers in Ontario, including caregivers, declared their intended occupation as licensed practical nurse. And only 205 new permanent residents in Ontario declared nursing as their intended occupation to the Immigration Department in 2019.

Yet, that year more than 4,500 internationally educated nurses applied to the Ontario College of Nursing, which requires applicants to be citizens, permanent residents, or have a valid work/study permit, suggesting that most of those applicants would already be in the country.

The gap in the data is likely immigrants with nursing backgrounds who come to Canada through the caregiver program. They would record their intended occupation on immigration documents as health care or as personal support worker, work in a long-term-care setting and not as a nurse, “because that’s the focus of the immigration stream that they’re entering Canada through,” said Naomi Lightman, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Calgary.

The forms are “not really taken to be aspirational. It’s taken to be quite practical. It’s administrative. They’re just filling out where they think their best chances are as anyone would. So I think it certainly doesn’t speak to the human capital of those immigrants,” said Lightman, whose research has shown that caregivers are typically highly skilled and more than half have a bachelor’s degree.

Applicants who apply to the college of nurses must have Canadian citizenship, permanent residency or a valid work/study permit to practise nursing in Ontario. But a work permit for a specific type of employment, such as live-in caregiver, isn’t recognized, according to the College of Nurses of Ontario.

Lightman’s research also shows anecdotally that many caregivers start retraining, but are unable to finish because of the “cost or because of family obligations.”

“There are a lot of barriers to upgrading their skills or actually transferring their credentials from their home country,” said Lightman.

For those who remain on the path, the College of Nurses of Ontario says it can take up to 18 months to get licensed, although Samantha Moore, a registered nurse who bought a nurse recruiting company called PRN Staffing Solutions, says it is more like one to three years.

Her company recruits internationally educated nurses for rural hospitals in northern Ontario and other parts of the country.

Some are so desperate for nurses they offer moving expenses, paid housing, and in the case of Newfoundland and Labrador, a $20,000 relocation reimbursement package to attract staff. That province does not require nurses to have work permits or permanent residency to get an active nursing licence.

“Since COVID, it’s been very difficult,” said Moore. “I’ve got four nurses that we actually have signed offer letters with that are dealing with immigration. And they’ve had job offers for over six months. But immigration is just unfortunately extremely slow with COVID so they haven’t been able to get the paperwork to come into the country.”

Moore thinks the process could be streamlined.

“There’s a lot of complications that come from everything. Immigration needs one thing, NNAS needs another. Each province needs another,” said Moore, who worked in England for a time and said the process to licensure there was much simpler.

“As a nurse myself, it’s not that I want anyone uneducated or lower to get in and get a licence. It just needs to be a streamlined, faster process.”

The Manitoba government recently recognized the barriers that internationally educated nurses face and announced an initiative to provide those in the province with up to $23,000 in financial assistance for clinical competence assessments, bridge training and other expenses such as a living allowance and child care.

The Ontario government recently announced a program similar to Manitoba’s to entice nurses to work in long-term care, as well as a plan to add 500 enrolments to bridging programs.

Eligible registered practical nurses, who typically have a diploma, will have access to up to $10,000 a year toward upgrading their education to become registered nurses, which requires a degree. A further $5,000 a year will be available to candidates to cover expenses such as course materials, tutoring and child care.

Internationally trained nurses who are eligible can access up to $6,000 a year in financial support to gain the credentials they need to work in Ontario.

In return, the government expects applicants to commit to long-term-care work for the same amount of time as they received funding under the program.

When Manitoba offered the incentives, the government said it didn’t know how many internationally educated nurses were in the province but the program, announced July 8, received 1,210 online applications in the first week.

For Coneybeare, the process has already dragged out for so long that she left her job in Los Angeles and moved to Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington in June to be closer to her daughter, who goes to school there.

It took her months to gather all of the documentation required by the NNAS, including transcripts from both schools she attended and syllabuses for every course she took.

In December of 2020, she says the NNAS told her it was reviewing her file but then in June she got a request for more transcripts, which she says she’d already sent. The NNAS doesn’t start the review until it has every document it requires and it says it typically takes around nine months to gather all the documents. The review takes a minimum of 12 weeks from that point.

She finally received her NNAS assessment Nov. 8 and said in an email that she has been told she should be registered (licensed) by the Ontario College of Nurses in less than half the time it took for the assessment.

The process is rigorous, rightfully, as Coneybeare says, but it has made it difficult to make any plans to move to Canada.

“If I had trusted the process and said, ‘Oh, well, you know, great, I’ll be licensed and I’ll be able to start applying for jobs 12 weeks after the first of December 2020,’ then I would have been applying for jobs back in February, which I started to do,” said Coneybeare. “And (I) found out very quickly that nobody’s going to pay any attention to your application because you have not got the NNAS seal of approval.”

Another Canadian, Grant Nockles, is also waiting for the NNAS to assess his U.K. education and says it took him six months to get all of the documents, including his university transcript from 1997 and references.

Nockles has worked as a nurse in the U.K. for 21 years, has a master’s in advanced health-care practice and, he says, “quite a vast bag of experience under my belt.”

“It’s quite a long and frustrating wait,” said Nockles. “My life is waiting for me in Canada. I mean, I know they have to have these standards to protect the public and to have that assurance. But I think with any kind of pandemic or world challenge, you kind of adapt — how else can we make this process quicker, but in a safe way?”

Nurses have always been the front lines of health care but never more critical than during the COVID-19 crisis. In this ongoing series, we explore the many issues impacting nursing.

Patty Winsa is a Toronto-based data reporter for the Star. Reach her via email: pwinsa@thestar.ca
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Round dance flash mob takes over Edmonton mall



Adam Lachacz
CTVNewsEdmonton.ca 
Digital Producer
Updated Nov. 28, 2021 


EDMONTON -

A flash mob, Indigenous singing, and a flurry of orange shirts surprised shoppers at Kingsway Mall Sunday afternoon.

Dozens of people started a round dance in front of Mac Cosmetics around 2:15 p.m. to raise awareness about Canada's residential school system's harm to Indigenous people.

Ambyr Miller, a participant, told CTV News that the surprise round dance was organized to help keep the search for unmarked graves and quest for the truth about the harms residential schools caused at the forefront of people's minds.



"There are still children who need to be uncovered across the country," Miller said.

"A lot of us, we have family members who just want that closure," she added. "We want to know what happened to these children, and we want them brought home."

Miller described how a round dance is meant to keep community ties strong.

"It's a dance of celebration. It's a dance of kinship, and it's fun."

 

If you are a former residential school student in distress, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools
 Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419

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Can we stop Canada’s thawing permafrost from releasing huge volumes of greenhouse gases? The solution could be wild

Russia’s Pleistocene Park provides a strong example of what can be done to help prevent the release of greenhouse gases as Canada’s permafrost thaws
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 23, 2021


Sergey Zimov, 66, a scientist who works at Russia's Northeast Science Station, tries to take a picture of a camel at the Pleistocene Park outside the town of Chersky, Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, Russia, on Sept. 13.

In Eastern Siberia, above the Arctic Circle, Russian researchers are attempting to bring back landscapes not seen since mammoths roamed the Earth. At Pleistocene Park, they’ve fenced off 16 square kilometres and introduced bison, muskox, horses and other herbivores. They hope the animals’ grazing will transform the landscape into grassland, which will cool the underlying permafrost.

Uninitiated visitors might mistake the Arctic for one of Earth’s last great unspoiled wildernesses. Nikita Zimov, Pleistocene Park’s director, regards it as an ecosystem degraded by hunters who arrived 14,500 years ago. They quickly wiped out mammoths and other large animals, he says, resulting in the disappearance of expansive grasslands they once maintained.

“In the Russian Arctic you don’t really see much wildlife – it’s a sad situation,” he said. “We’ve started to bring animals in, and we are supporting them.”

This Tiny Creature Survived 24,000 Years Frozen in Siberian Permafrost

A father and son’s Ice Age plot to slow Siberian thaw

Established in 1996, Pleistocene Park attracted greater interest during the last decade as scientists began studying “permafrost carbon feedback.” Permafrost contains a motherlode of organic matter that will decompose if unfrozen, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects widespread permafrost thaw this century as temperatures rise. Many researchers fear that could produce a calamitous cycle, in which releases from permafrost beget more warming which begets still more thawing, effectively turbocharging climate change.


An employee of the Pleistocene Park leaves for holidays, outside the town of Chersky, in Yakutia Republic, Russia, Sept. 13, 2021.MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Ted Schuur, a professor at Northern Arizona University’s Center for Ecosystem Sciences and Society, said that in well-studied regions like Alaska, there’s evidence thawing permafrost is already releasing greenhouse gases. Although he acknowledged there’s less evidence from other regions. “We should act as a society even in the face of uncertainty,” he said, “as this issue is unlikely to go away.” Canada has declared that it must act decisively to limit permafrost thaw.

But act how, precisely?

There are few cogent, targeted options. At a conference earlier this year organized by the PCF Action Group, a new collaboration among scientists, permafrost engineers, entrepreneurs, participants focused on massive “geoengineering” schemes intended to affect Earth’s entire climate. Many of the ambitious proposals read like science fiction film scripts.

But the approach taken at Pleistocene Park, which has been dubbed “megafaunal ecological engineering,” is among the more mature: Mr. Zimov’s experiment, after all, has been running for a quarter century.
Vadim Meshcheryakov, an employee of the Pleistocene Park, checks greenhouse gas sensors at the Ambolikha station, outside of the town of Chersky, Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, Russia.MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Grassland protects permafrost by changing the landscape’s albedo – that is, its ability to reflect sunlight. Grassland’s albedo is far higher than tundra dominated by moss and shrubs, or taiga forest, particularly when it’s covered by snow and ice. Grazing animals also trample snow in winter, reducing its insulating effect and thus chilling the ground underneath.

A 2019 study by the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford suggests this approach works: mean soil temperatures in the park’s grazed areas were 2.2 degrees Celsius cooler than in a control area. (Mr. Zimov co-authored the study.) John Moore, a professor at the University of Lapland in Finland who specializes in climate research and geoengineering, said that finding demonstrates “a pretty significant improvement in the long-term stability of the permafrost.”

Different grazing patterns have been shown to change land albedo elsewhere, he added. Norwegian reindeer herders use their side of the fenced border between Norway and Finland primarily in winter; in summer their side is dominated by white lichens that reflect sunlight. Finland’s much larger reindeer herds graze on the other side of the fence in summertime, eating the lichens and promoting a greener landscape.

But it’s unclear how megafaunal engineering could be scaled up sufficiently to protect large swaths of Arctic permafrost.

Pleistocene Park’s evolution has been painfully slow. Mr. Zimov’s father, Sergey Zimov, began his first grazing experiments in 1988 but the Soviet Union’s collapse interrupted them. In 1996, he resumed the work, establishing Pleistocene Park. It’s now home to roughly 40 Yakutian horses, a dozen bison, three musk ox, 20 reindeer, fewer than 15 moose, 18 sheep, eight yak and 15 cattle – a curious menagerie, but hardly a sprawling new biome.

Of 2,000 hectares in the fenced area, Mr. Zimov estimates that only 100 hectares are halfway through their transition to grassland; the rest of the park is at earlier stages.

“I don’t think there are any places in the park where we’re able to say, ‘We are done here,’” he said. “But I see that many places are in transition. Overall, the productivity is increasing.”

One reason for the painstaking progress was that the Zimov family funded the project’s early development almost entirely. More recently, the project has begun to win sponsors. But the 2019 paper acknowledged that a rigorous experiment would require thousands of animals – an expensive proposition. Introducing three herds of 1,000 animals each would cost an estimated US$114 million.
A piece of mammoth's tusk lies in the waters of the Kolyma river at Duvanny Yar southwest of the town of Chersky in Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, Russia, September 12, 2021.MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Herds can’t be conjured out of thin air. The muskox and bison largely look after themselves, Mr. Zimov said, but researchers must provide forage for other species during the harsh winters. Mr. Zimov plans further interventions such as introducing predators to encourage “landscapes of fear,” which would change grazing patterns. (Left unmolested, many herbivores don’t move around much in winter, meaning they won’t trample enough snow.) Mr. Zimov has even broached the possibility of reintroducing long-extinct creatures such as mammoths and cave lions, though the 2019 paper acknowledged that neither is “available in the near future.”

Such ongoing and planned intervention highlights the reality that Pleistocene Park is not self-sustaining. It’s not clear it will ever be.

Mr. Zimov himself was uncertain whether the concept could be replicated elsewhere. Like Russia, he said, Canada has large swaths of unpopulated territory, and lots of permafrost. But the geography is different: Much of Canada’s north is rocky and contains less carbon-risk permafrost. More research would be needed, he said, to determine whether it could work here.

“Even though everybody loves the idea of rewilding the Arctic, reversing the changes that humans caused by hunting mammoths and other large fauna to extinction,” Dr. Moore observed, “in practice it’s a little more difficult.”

Indeed, the risks of geoengineering are high.


(Above) A general view of forest and tundra areas outside the town of Chersky, Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, Russia. (Below) Sergey Zimov, 66, a scientist who works at Russia's Northeast Science Station, checks for permafrost at the Pleistocene Park outside the town of Chersky, Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, Russia. September 13, 2021.MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Damon Matthews, a professor of climate science and sustainability at Concordia University, told conference attendees about historical interventions in ecosystems such as an attempt in the late 19th century to protect Hawaii’s sugarcane industry from rat infestation. Since rats were an invasive species with no natural predators on the islands, mongoose were introduced. It was belatedly recognized that rats are nocturnal and mongoose hunt during the day, so the mongoose hunted and destroyed other species such as sea turtles instead.

“The history of biocontrol, from mongooses in Hawaii, to cane toads in Australia, to African land snails, show that attempts to intervene in complex ecological systems have led to worse outcomes,” Dr. Matthews said. “Geoengineering would very likely increase, rather than decrease, net climate damages. What we need to do is get on with decarbonization itself.”

But today’s Arctic, Mr. Zimov contends, is itself the product of large-scale human intervention. The grasslands he’s attempting to restore were “the most productive ecosystems which have ever been on our planet,” he said. “We destroyed it. And I think it’s now a possibility to bring it back.”


Duvanny Yar gives a side-on view of the permafrost thaw taking place underground where ancient Pleistocene-era flora and fauna have been frozen for millennia
MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

A father and son’s Ice Age plot to slow Siberian thaw

Tom Balmforth and Clare Baldwin
Sat, November 27, 2021

Scientist Sergey Zimov checks for permafrost at the Pleistocene Park outside the town of Chersky, Russia (Reuters)

In one of the planet’s coldest places, 130km south of Russia’s Arctic coast, scientist Sergey Zimov can find no sign of permafrost as global warming permeates Siberia’s soil.

As everything from mammoth bones to ancient vegetation frozen inside it for millennia thaws and decomposes, it now threatens to release vast amounts of greenhouse gases.

Zimov, who has studied permafrost from his scientific base in the diamond-producing Yakutia region for decades, is seeing the effects of climate change in real time.

An abandoned vessel is seen near the Northeast Science Station (Reuters)

Sergey checks materials stored underground in the permafrost (Reuters)

Driving a thin metal pole metres into the Siberian turf, where temperatures are rising at more than three times the world average, with barely any force, the 66-year-old is matter-of-fact.

“This is one of the coldest places on Earth and there is no permafrost,” he says. “Methane has never increased in the atmosphere at the speed it is today... I think this is linked to our permafrost.”

Permafrost covers 65 per cent of Russia’s landmass and about a quarter of the northern landmass. Scientists say that greenhouse gas emissions from its thaw could eventually match or even exceed the European Union’s industrial emissions due to the sheer volume of decaying organic matter.

Meanwhile, permafrost emissions, which are seen as naturally occurring, are not counted against government pledges aimed at curbing emissions or in the spotlight at the UN climate talks. Zimov, with his white beard and cigarette, ignored orders to leave the Arctic when the Soviet Union collapsed and instead found funding to keep the Northeast Science Station near the part-abandoned town of Chersky operating.

Citing data from a US-managed network of global monitoring stations, Zimov says he now believes the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that permafrost has begun to release greenhouse gases.

A house located on land that has been deformed by permafrost thaw (Reuters)

An industrial building that was destroyed when the permafrost thawed under its foundation (Reuters)

Maria Nedostupenko looks out of the window at her home which was damaged by permafrost under its foundation (Reuters)

Despite factories scaling back activity worldwide during the pandemic, which also dramatically slowed global transport, Zimov says the concentration of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been growing at a faster rate.

Whole cities sit on permafrost and its thawing could cost Russia 7 trillion roubles (£750m) in damage by 2050 if the rate of warming continues, scientists say.

Built on the assumption that the permafrost would never thaw, many homes, pipelines and roads in Russia’s far north and east are now sinking and increasingly in need of repair.

Ice age animals

Zimov wants to slow the thaw in one area of Yakutia by populating a nature reserve called the Pleistocene Park with large herbivores including bison, horses and camels.


Horses graze on the grounds of the Pleistocene Park (Reuters)

Such animals trample the snow, making it much more compact so the winter cold can get through to the ground, rather than it acting as a thick insulating blanket.

Zimov and his son Nikita began introducing animals into the fenced park in 1996 and have so far relocated around 200 of different species, which they say are making the permafrost colder compared with other areas.

Bison were trucked and shipped this summer from Denmark, along the northern sea route, past polar bears and walruses and through weeks-long storms, before their ship finally turned into the mouth of the Kolyma River towards their new home some 6,000 kilometres to the east.

The Zimovs’ surreal plan for geo-engineering a cooler future has extended to offering a home for mammoths, which other scientists hope to resurrect from extinction with genetic techniques, in order to mimic the region’s ecosystem during the last ice age that ended 11,700 years ago.

Nikolay Basharin, a scientist, holds a bull's skull in an underground permafrost laboratory (Reuters)

Trees lean precariously at Duvanny Yar (Reuters)

A paper published in Nature’s Scientific Reports last year, where both Zimovs were listed as authors, showed that the animals in Pleistocene Park had reduced the average snow depth by half, and the average annual soil temperature by 1.9C, with an even bigger drop in winter and spring.

More work is needed to determine if such “unconventional” methods might be an effective climate change mitigation strategy but the density of animals in Pleistocene Park – 114 per square kilometre – should be feasible on a pan-Arctic scale, it said.

And global-scale models suggest introducing big herbivores onto the tundra could stop 37 per cent of Arctic permafrost from thawing, the paper said.

Permathaw?

Nikita was walking in the shallows of the river Kolyma at Duvanny Yar in September when he fished out a mammoth tusk and tooth. Such finds have been common for years in Yakutia and particularly by rivers where the water erodes the permafrost.

Three hours by boat from Chersky, the river bank provides a cross-section of the thaw, with a thick sheet of exposed ice melting and dripping below layers of dense black earth containing small grass roots.

Nikita Zimov, the director of the Pleistocene park, holds a piece of a mammoth’s tusk (Reuters)

A bone is seen on the bank of the Kolyma river (Reuters)

“If you take the weight of all these roots and decaying organics in the permafrost from Yakutia alone, you’d find the weight was more than the land-based biomass of the planet,” Nikita says.

Scientists say that on average, the world has warmed one degree in the last century, while in Yakutia over the last 50 years, the temperature has risen three degrees.

The older Zimov says he has seen for himself how winters have grown shorter and milder, while Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, says he no longer has to wear fur clothing during the coldest months.

But addressing permafrost emissions, like fire and other so-called natural emissions, presents a challenge because they are not fully accounted for in climate models or international agreements, scientists say.

“The difficulty is the quantity,” says Chris Burn, a professor at Carleton University in Canada and president of the International Permafrost Association. “One or two per cent of permafrost carbon is equivalent to total global emissions for a year.”

Scientists estimate that permafrost in the northern hemisphere contains about 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon – about twice as much as is currently in the atmosphere, or about three times as much as in all of the trees and plants on Earth.

Nikita says there is no single solution to global warming. “We’re working to prove that these ecosystems will help in the fight, but, of course, our efforts alone are not enough.”

Photography by Maxim Shemetov, Reuters

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B.C. government says it isn't responsible for Wet'suwet'en divisions, arrests of Coastal GasLink activists

WAIT, WHAT?

'It is not the government of the day that directs police to do

 their work,' says Indigenous affairs minister

Winston Szeto · CBC News · 
B.C. Indigenous Affairs Minister Murray Rankin says the provincial government isn't responsible for the arrests of dozens of activists in their standoff with RCMP over the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. (Mathieu Thériault/CBC)

B.C. Indigenous Affairs Minister Murray Rankin is defending his government's approach to working with the Wet'suwet'en Nation on land management after RCMP officers were deployed to arrest opponents of the Coastal GasLink pipeline project being built in northwest B.C.

Coastal GasLink has signed agreements with multiple elected band councils along the pipeline route.

But the company has failed to gain approval from the majority of hereditary chiefs within the Wet'suwet'en who, in the landmark Delgamuukw case, were recognized as having authority over the land that predates the establishment of elected band councils created by Canada's Indian Act.

Still, the provincial government, under the B.C. Liberals, approved the project in 2014 and it continues to be supported by the governing NDP.

For this reason, B.C. Green MLA Adam Olsen has accused the province of leveraging division between elected Wet'suwet'en chiefs and councillors and Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs to protect corporate interests.

B.C. Green MLA Adam Olsen criticizes the B.C. NDP government for exploiting divisions within the Wet'suwet'en Nation to pursue corporate interest behind the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. (JoAnnWay.com / nuttycake.com)

"This government has been exploiting divisions in our communities created by the Indian Act," Olsen said this week. 

"This government soaks in the accolades of passing the [United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act], but then are unwilling to change the racist government structures that have created the conflict that we face today instead of the much assured reconciliation."

But Rankin says his government remains committed to reconciliation.

"My reaction is that it is entirely an unfair characterization," he said in an interview with CBC Daybreak North host Carolina de Ryk.  

"The community is divided as a result of the impacts and trauma of colonialism — it is the federal government that created [the] Indian Act," he said. "It is absolutely unfair to say we are exploiting those divisions — we're trying to unify the nation."

Coastal GasLink's gas pipeline crosses about 625 rivers, creeks, waters, streams and lakes on its 670 kilometre route across northern B.C. (CBC News)

In Feb. 2019, the B.C. NDP government began a reconciliation process with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs. This April, the government reached a three-year agreement with the chiefs to provide them $7.2 million in support of their efforts to reunify members of the Wet'suwet'en Nation in order to implement their rights and title.

But Rankin said that process has been slowed by a number of factors including COVID-19.

"My hope is that we can get back to that table to do that long overdue work," he said.

When asked why RCMP were deployed to Wet'suwet'en territory to make arrests during a provincial state of emergency in southern B.C., Rankin said that was a decision made by police, and that politicians do not and should not have any say over their operations.

"The province did not bring that injunction … It was the company who sought the assistance of the court through an injunction to allow it to do work that it had the legal right to pursue," he said. 

"In our democracy, it is not the government of the day that directs police to do their work." 

B.C. Liberal MLA Ellis Ross says CGL pipeline activists are being disrespectful to the Wet'suwet'en Nation's elected band chiefs and councillors. (B.C. Liberal Party)

B.C. Liberal MLA Ellis Ross, who signed an agreement supporting Coastal GasLink when he was chief councillor of the Haisla Nation, also spoke up about the pipeline this week, arguing the project has created economic prosperity for First Nations.  

He also says activists acting in support of Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs are being disrespectful to the Wet'suwet'en First Nation's elected band chiefs and councils who support the pipeline project.

"Everybody's manipulating First Nations for their own purposes and their own agenda, and it's wrong, especially when you think about what these elected leaders [have been] trying to achieve for the last 15 years at least — they were trying to get their people out of poverty, away from suicide, away from imprisonment," Ross said on CBC's On The Coast.

But hereditary chiefs and their supporters say they will continue to act to prevent the pipeline from being built.

"It is Cas Yikh territory. That means we're the stewards," Chief Woos, one of the hereditary chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation, said in an interview on CBC As It Happens this week. "We're the ones that make decisions as to who can go on our territory. And it's not up to [Coastal GasLink]. It's not up to a court system to decide that. It's not up to them."

With files from Daybreak North, On The Coast and The Canadian Press

Montrealer's demonstrate at RCMP building in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en

By Dan Spector Global News
Posted November 27, 2021 

WATCH: People gathered in Montreal on Saturday to show solidarity with the people of the Wetʼsuwetʼen First Nations territory in British Columbia and to denounce the actions taken by the RCMP. Dan Spector reports.



Hundreds of people gathered for a loud protest at the RCMP’s Quebec headquarters in Montreal on Saturday afternoon.

They were demonstrating in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people who oppose a natural gas pipeline project that would run through the First Nation’s territory in northern British Columbia.

“How would you like it if each of you went home today and the RCMP is saying, ‘No, you can’t go in here,'” said Montreal-based Wet’suwet’en elder Marlene Hale, who played a drum to kick off the protest.

Just over a week ago the RCMP arrested 15 people, including two journalists.

The RCMP was enforcing a B.C. Supreme Court-ordered injunction that stops opponents from impeding access to Coastal GasLink’s activities, permitted under Canadian law.

“Shame on you! Go away!” the crowd yelled in unison.

Archie Fineberg said at almost 80 years old, it was the first protest he’d ever attended.

“It’s time that the Indigenous people in Canada stop being abused and it’s time for the Canadian people, starting with the government, to respect the commitments they have made,” he said.

Environmentalists and other groups also joined the rally, which was watched closely by a large contingent of Montreal police in riot gear. They kept the demonstrators from getting close to the doors of the RCMP building.

“I came down from Kanesatake,” said Alan Harrington. “To show solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation against the trespassing and the terrorism that the RCMP is doing on our on our Indigenous people.”

After some spirited speeches, the rally turned into a march through downtown Montreal.

RELATED NEWS



Protesters march to back Wet’suwet’en in opposition to B.C. pipeline

Montreal police were out in force and the demonstration was declared illegal at about 4 p.m.

Author of the article:Frédéric Tomesco
Publishing date:Nov 28, 2021 • 4 hours ago • 3 minute read • Join the conversation
Wet'suwet'en elder Marlene Hale leads a demonstration showing support for British Columbia's Wet'suwet'en people, who are fighting the construction of a natural gas pipeline by Coastal Gas Linkin, in Montreal on Saturday, Nov. 27, 2021. 
PHOTO BY JOHN MAHONEY /Montreal Gazette

About 100 people braved the bitter cold in Westmount on Saturday to express support for British Columbia’s Wet’suwet’en nation and voice their opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Wet’suwet’en members Marlene Hale and Eve Saint spoke to the crowd for close to an hour, underlining their people’s determination to defend its land. They also railed against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the RCMP.

“We will get this done,” Hale said, eliciting cheers


The demonstration is one of several across Canada that have followed an RCMP raid of the Gidimt’en checkpoint in Wet’suwet’en territory earlier this month. RCMP officers arrested land defenders who have been blocking access to the worksites of the 670-kilometre pipeline, part of which would run through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The pipeline is being constructed to transport natural gas from northeastern B.C. to a marine port in Kitimat.

“A protest like this is needed,” Al Harrington, a native of Shoal Lake, Ont., who now resides in Kanesatake, told the Montreal Gazette before the start of the protest. “There are Canadian laws being broken by the Canadian government and the RCMP. They’re not respecting our rights, and this needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. We came here to show solidarity and to let them know that this won’t be tolerated.”

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Wet’suwet’en members Marlene Hale, left, and Eve Saint address demonstrators outside RCMP headquarters in Westmount. 
PHOTO BY JOHN MAHONEY /Montreal Gazette

Montreal police were out in force for the demonstration, which began a few metres from the RCMP’s Quebec headquarters. Access to the building was blocked by several police and Sûreté du Québec cruisers and vans. Dozens of riot police were on hand, as were plenty of bike squad officers.

“Land back,” “No consent, no access,” “No pipelines on stolen native land,” “The crimes of colonization cannot be buried” and “Wet’suwet’en Strong” read some of the signs held aloft by protesters. Mohawk, Palestinian and Soviet   RED HAMMER AND SICKLE flags could be seen fluttering in the wind.

NO EXPLANATION FOR WHY THE POLICE DECLARED THE MARCH ILLEGAL!

“Whose street? Our street!” protesters chanted in French as the march got under way in mid-afternoon. At about 4 p.m., as the crowd reached Atwater Ave. and Ste-Catherine St., police declared the demonstration illegal.

Four people were arrested in connection with the protest, Montreal police department spokesman Raphaël Bergeron said Sunday. Three of the arrests were for obstructing police work, while the other one was for assault on an officer and obstructing police work. The individuals were released on a promise to return to court at a later date, he said.

Organized by an anti-capitalist collective called Convergence des luttes anticapitalistes, the event also drew participants from organizations such as Independent Jewish Voices and the pro-Marxist group Fightback.

“What we’re trying to do is to build bridges between the labour movement in Canada and the Indigenous struggle,” said Connor Bennett, a Concordia University student who is part of Fightback. “Inherently, both are struggles against these major corporations and both are struggles against capitalism. So we’re trying to make a united struggle of workers, Indigenous people and all oppressed people in Canada against what we believe to be the source, which is capitalism.”

Other protests may follow because anger at the RCMP is growing across Canada, said Aaron Lakoff, who was holding a banner that read “Justice, paix et solidarité” together with colleagues from the Independent Jewish Voices group.

“Look at what happened in February 2020, after the last RCMP raid,” Lakoff said. “There was a movement of people all across the country working to shut down Canada , and that put pressure on the government to reckon with the violence they were perpetrating. More and more people are questioning Canada’s relationship with First Nations people. They want to have better relations that are based on nation-to-nation friendship.”

That improved dialogue starts with education, said Harrington, who walked from Kanesatake to Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., this summer to raise awareness about the 215 Indigenous children whose remains were found at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

“When we were out there meeting people, a lot of them didn’t know the story,” he said. “They heard about it on the news, but they didn’t go any further. So what’s needed is more education in the school system, and truth. Truth is No. 1.”

ftomesco@postmedia.com
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Pinched by energy crisis, Spanish coal plant slated for closure fires up
Reuters | November 24, 2021 

The As Pontes power station is a four-unit coal-fired power plant with a total capacity of 1,468.5 MW. (Image courtesy of Endesa.)

Soaring demand for electricity in Spain, where a cold snap is exacerbating an energy crunch, has pushed power company Endesa to restart a coal plant that has been idle since July and is slated for closure as part of European emissions-cutting goals.


A spike in global gas prices has coincided with planned maintenance at three of Spain’s five nuclear plants and a drop in hydroelectric output brought on by low rainfall, just as the onset of winter is pushing more Spaniards to turn on their heating.

To help the grid cope, Endesa restarted operations on Monday at one unit of its 1,400-megawatt As Pontes coal plant in the northwestern Galicia region.

Steam could be seen billowing from one of the plant’s two giant cooling towers on Wednesday.

It is not possible to determine how long this entirely exceptional situation will persist, an Endesa spokesperson said.

The company has been seeking government approval since 2019 to close the plant as part of its plan to phase out coal, in line with Spain’s pledge to end coal generation by 2030, the spokesperson added.

Until the closure is official, operators have to keep offering its power to the national grid. Before the recent gas market uproar, the cost of emitting carbon had priced coal power out of the market and the plant had been idle.
Temporary switch back

Even though coal accounts for a negligible proportion of Spain’s energy mix – less than 2% of output according to climate consultancy Ember – the return of As Pontes marks a strong contrast with neighbouring Portugal, which shut down its last remaining coal plant last weekend.

But the trajectory is similar – by the end of October, Spain had burnt 16% less coal than at that point last year, Ember said.

With natural gas prices near record highs, several other countries are temporarily making the switch back to coal.

Data from Ember showed coal generation in the European Union jumped by some 18,000 GWh in the third quarter, even as overall fossil fuel use dropped by 16,000 GWh, or around 7%, from a year earlier.

(By Nathan Allen and Isla Binnie; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
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We All Nearly Missed The Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Detected


(Rebecca Carey, University of Tasmania/Adam Soule, WHOI)
NATURE
PETER DOCKRILL
26 NOVEMBER 2021

She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a "peculiar large mass" floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand.

The Kiwi passenger emailed photos of the strange ocean slick to scientists, who realized what it was – a raft of floating rock spewed from an underwater volcano, produced in the largest eruption of its kind ever recorded.

"We knew it was a large-scale eruption, approximately equivalent to the biggest eruption we've seen on land in the 20th Century," said volcanologist Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania, who co-led the first close-up investigation of the historic 2012 eruption, and together with colleagues finally published the results in a paper in 2018.

The incident, produced by an underwater volcano called the Havre Seamount, initially went unnoticed by scientists, but the floating rock platform it generated was harder to miss.


High-resolution seafloor topography of the Havre caldera (Rebecca Carey, University of Tasmania/Adam Soule, WHOI)

Back in 2012, the raft – composed of pumice, a type of very light, air-filled volcanic rock – covered some 400 square kilometres (154 square miles) of the south-west Pacific Ocean, but months later satellites recorded it dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand itself.

Under the surface, the sheer scale of the rocky aftermath took scientists aback when they inspected the site in 2015, at depths as low as 1,220 metres (4,000 feet).

"When we looked at the detailed maps from the AUV [autonomous underwater vehicle], we saw all these bumps on the seafloor and I thought the vehicle's sonar was acting up," said volcanologist Adam Soule from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

"It turned out that each bump was a giant block of pumice, some of them the size of a van. I had never seen anything like it on the seafloor."

The investigation – conducted with the AUV Sentry and the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Jason – reveals that Havre Seamount's eruption was more complex than anyone topside ever knew.

The caldera, which spans nearly 4.5 kilometres (about 3 miles), discharged lava from some 14 vents in a "massive rupture of the volcanic edifice", producing not just pumice rock, but ash, lava domes, and seafloor lava flows.

It may have been (thankfully) buried under an ocean of water, but for a sense of scale, think roughly 1.5 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens – or 10 times the size of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland.

The researchers say that of the material erupted, three-quarters or more floated to the surface and drifted away – tonnes of it washing up onto shorelines an ocean away.

The rest of it was scattered around the nearby seafloor, bringing devastation to the biological communities who called it home, and are only now rebounding.

"The record of this eruption on Havre volcano itself is highly unfaithful," said Carey.

"[I]t preserves a small component of what was actually produced, which is important for how we interpret ancient submarine volcanic successions that are now uplifted and are highly prospective for metals and minerals."

With samples collected by the submersibles yielding what the scientists say could amount to a decade's worth of research, it's a huge, rare opportunity to study what takes place when a volcano erupts under the sea – a phenomenon that actually accounts for more than 70 percent of all volcanism on Earth, even if it's a bit harder to spot.

"Underwater eruptions are fundamentally different than those on land," noted one of the team, geophysicist Michael Manga from UC Berkeley.

"There is no on-land equivalent."

The findings were reported in Science Advances.

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