May 27, 2022

Erica:What does it look like to translate academic research into better environmental policy and practice? In this episode of the podcast by the University of British Columbia Cluster for Microplastics Health and the Environment, we catch a glimpse into the world of policymaking from scholars with some fascinating stories to share. Take a listen. 


Amanda: I'm Amanda Giang. I'm an assistant professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, and also the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UBC. The work in our group is really focused on trying to develop tools to support policy decision making around pollution, climate and energy. And we really try to integrate you know, state of the art methods from engineering, natural sciences, and the social sciences when we do that.

Rashid: I'm Rashid Sumaila. I'm a university Killam professor and Canada research chair in interdisciplinary oceans and fisheries economics. I'm jointly appointed at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. My goal is to see how to integrate economics with other disciplines in order to ensure that we end up with infinity fish that is fish forever for us and for our future generations.


Erica: Thank you very much to both of you. Can I ask you Rashid to say a little bit more about that? Can you tell us a little bit more about the methods that you use?

Rashid: Yeah. So in terms of methods, I mean, I think a key element of our method is interdisciplinarity. And to actually explain this a little bit more, let me take you on this short journey. If you look at the ocean and you see what people do with the ocean, or to the ocean, you can boil this down to just two things. One is that we go to the ocean and we take the things we need the, things we desire, the things we want, out of the ocean. The good stuff from the ocean, like the fish, like the energy, and so on and so forth, into our economy, into our social systems, our cultures. We do what we do with this, and then we generate waste in the process. And this waste ends up in the ocean or the larger environment. So from the ocean, good things come, to the ocean bad things go. And the challenge for all of us working with the ocean is how to help society to ensure that we don't overtake and we don't over pollute, and economics has a role to play. We need to know the ecology, we need to know all the science, the physics, the biophysics, thinking of climate change, all that that does to the ocean. And then we need to understand economics, the social aspects, the cultural aspects, Indigenous aspects.


Erica: How about you, Amanda? Tell us a little bit about what your work looks like on the ground.

Amanda: I actually see a lot of commonalities to what Rashid just described in terms of that really interdisciplinary approach. And I think a lot of us who are really problem focused in our work have that in common. So for me, rather than the oceans, one of the key themes of my work is pollution, whether that's carbon pollution, toxic air pollution, plastics. I'm really interested in tracing what the impacts of those pollutants are from their sources to impacts. And so if we want to do that, though, it really does require that sort of interdisciplinary approach, right? Because it's not just thinking about, you know, pollutants just in the air. But we're interested in these questions of what sorts of human activity or, you know, natural sources drive these sources. What does that mean in terms of environmental impacts? What do those environmental impacts in turn mean for human impacts in terms of, you know, well-being, health, the economy, justice, and how that loops back in a circle. And so I think if the work in our group is really focused on trying to develop decision support tools for thinking about these systems as a whole, it really does require us to, you know, integrate, you know, different disciplines, different methods, different ways of knowing to try to do that and do that in a really collaborative way.

Now, I am also in an engineering department. So for our group, definitely some of the core methods that are involved in that have to do with computational modeling and also data science. But we're really interested in integrating that with insights from the social sciences as well, because I think it's really important to bring those things together to actually develop tools that make sense in terms of real decision making contexts. 


Erica: And so thinking about some of those decision making contexts, are there any moments in your work or particular partnerships that you can share that have been really significant to you?

Amanda: So many. I'm so worried that I won't mention, you know, someone important. I'll mention a couple right now that we're working on. So one is a collaborative project with colleagues in mechanical engineering and public health - The B.C. Center for Disease Control, National Center for a Collaborating Center for Environmental Health, and then also the Metro Vancouver Air Quality and Climate Change Division. And it's broadly a project that's looking at intersections between odour, air quality, and health. And I think that's, you know, an example of a topic that really links together these different kinds of expertise. One of the things that we're realizing is that, you know, often we think about these things as separate, but from a human impact perspective in terms of how people are experiencing these impacts, they're very much linked.

So, you know, someone might experience something like an unpleasant odour that maybe causes them a lot of distress, which can in turn lead to other sorts of health and wellbeing impacts. This might be emitted by, you know, a facility that is also emitting other sorts of air contaminants. And so from a regulatory perspective, there are definitely questions of, you know, how do you take into account these multiple different kinds of impacts that people might be experiencing simultaneously? And that incorporate both, you know, an air quality dimension, which is something that maybe you could go out there and measure with an instrument, and then also very much a human experience dimension, which you can't just measure that with an instrument, right? Experiences are so different from person to person. And those things kind of combine to create an impact in terms of human well-being. And so it's such a complex picture, it's such an interplay of all these different things, it really requires, you know, a lot of these different players to try to make sense of it and then also think about what that means in terms of intervention.


Erica: Thank you. Do you have any examples maybe beyond your work where you feel like there are concrete policies or moments that have really moved things forward in a way that was informed by research?

Amanda: Yes, absolutely. There's just so many it's a tough question because I, and of course I'm biased probably being a researcher. But I think research plays a really important role in a lot of different steps of advancing policy processes. One is just even in this idea of framing what policy problems are. Maybe here I will use the plastics example as a really important one.

So much of the early research that was just characterizing the fact that, wow, plastics are pervasive, they're persistent, we're finding them in all these different places. That really early research is so, so important for even bringing this to the radar of a lot of different, you know, groups, whether it's the public, decision makers.. Wow, is this actually a a sustainability challenge that we need to grapple with? So I think that's, you know, that early stage research was so important just in terms of establishing that this might be an area where we need some policy attention. But you can also think about, you know, when it comes time to design specific policy responses or interventions, that's another place where, again, research is so key, right? So, you know, if we're going to have an approach towards this, where does it make sense to prioritize our interventions? For instance, should we be really concerned about plastic microbeads or microfibers, for instance. Given that we have limited resources, you know, what should we focus on given the ecological or human or other impacts? So I think I'm just overwhelmed by the question because I feel like there are so many different ways in which research can inform that policy process.


Erica: Well, thank you. We can definitely re-explore some of those throughout throughout the conversation. But that's really helpful. Rashid, maybe I'll turn it to you to see how that resonates and ask about how your view of how research informs policy may have changed over the course of your career.

Rashid: Yeah, so Amanda got it right, it's overwhelming given all the tests we have been involved and engaged with in terms of policy. So in general, our work has really been taken seriously by very important policy organizations. So just to give you an example, I've given talks at the Canadian Parliament a number of times. The U.S. Senate, the African Union, the European Union. You know, you just name it. And in fact, I got an invitation, two times, to come and talk to a group of us with Prince Charles on the ocean and how to make it sustainable. So there is a lot of that. But I think I'll just give you two specific, two or three if you have time, specific examples.

Erica: For sure, yeah.

Rashid: Yeah. In 2016, I got this email from the State Department, this was Secretary John Kerry then that was the Secretary of State, and I got an email saying, we're going to have a big ocean conference, called Our Ocean Conference, and we want you to come and be the keynote for the Sustainable Oceans Section. And this is crazy, right? And so I got the email and it was real, so I ended up going there and the opening day was quite a day. I see that that's one of my highlights in terms of policy and also in terms of an academic having influence where things really matter. So we go in there and Secretary John Kerry opened the conference, gave his talk, and then he introduced President Obama, who gave his talk about the ocean just like a scholar. It was very impressive. There were almost 400 people from all over the world, from politicians to scientists, and just to fund this. So John Kerry finished his own and the next person to talk was Obama, as I said. And after Obama, it was Leonardo DiCaprio. And this is the crazy part. I was the fourth person to talk. So I like to say the next one was little Rashid. Who is Rashid? Here I am on the stage and I'm giving a talk here. And this is really serious stuff, right? They're taking this into policy. So that's that's just one example for you. 

The second example will be about plastic because that is relevant for this podcast. I got invited to join the committee of the National Academy of Engineering National Academies of Engineering, of science, engineering and mathematics to actually come up with the consensus report on the U.S. contribution to ocean plastic pollution. We publish our paper in December, and actually about two weeks ago, we had a meeting. It was virtual. We had a meeting with the White House Office of Science and Technology. So they got a summary, we had questions looking for future, the policy implications. And this, I think, really relates to to our topic here.


Erica: Why does microplastics matter for decision makers? Why should it matter? Why should they be paying attention?

Amanda: Yeah, this is a great question. I think microplastics, it's a really interesting and tricky challenge for both science reasons and then also policy reasons I would say. You know, when we're talking about plastic pollution, I think one of the things that we recognize now globally is that these plastics, they're fairly persistent, right? They don't just go away. In fact, you know, they might just degrade into even smaller kinds of plastics. These plastics they don't respect, you know, human boundaries let's say. They're definitely capable of traveling long distances, whether that's in the oceans or in the atmosphere. They're bioavailable, so, you know, we find them within different organisms, humans included. And then there's also a lot of uncertainty, right? There's a lot of uncertainty about what the impacts might be, ecologically, for human health. And I think these attributes mean that there are a lot of tough questions for science, but also tough questions for policy, because these are also attributes of other sorts of pollutants that we have had experience with, where we know that if we wait too long to act, there can be irreversible consequences sometimes or unpredicted consequences. And so I think some of the interest in terms of microplastics from from a policy perspective is really recognizing that this is a really complex space. We're trying to make decisions where there's a lot of uncertainty, but there are also a lot of impacts that are linked to a lot of different things. Whether that's biodiversity, human health, fisheries. In addition, plastics don't exist in a vacuum, right? When you think about, and here expanding to, you know, plastics as a whole, plastics link us to other issues right. Plastics are so embedded in every aspect of our lives. They're so embedded with the ways that we consume, the ways that we think about, you know, the industrial ecosystem and how we've organized that. And so I think microplastics is just such, or plastics in general, is such an interesting question also because it's, you know, it forces you to think about this in this really systems oriented way where, you know, you can't just deal with the environmental impacts and not think about, you know, the sorts of human activities that drive it. And this has implications, too, for things like global equity, sustainable development. I think for all these reasons, it's a fascinating, challenging, and really important science policy issue that we really do need to be tackling right now.


Erica: Thank you. That's really great and helpful. Rashid, do you have anything that you would want to add?

Rashid: Yeah, Amanda has been very comprehensive, and all I may be able to do is to emphasize and say what she has said in other ways and to extend a bit. So so yes, when I look at microplastic, to really get the picture I would like to start with plastic itself, and there is so much plastic everywhere, it's ubiquitous. Everything is plastic, right? And this thing then, I start with something that we can see that is big. Then, through its lifespan, it breaks down into this little microplastics OK, so that's one big issue with plastic, that it ends up that way, a lot of it. The second issue is the durability. It can live forever, you know, hundreds of years. So here you have something that can live forever that breaks into little particles, and this particles are so small that fish, for example, when they see them they think they are algae and they eat them. They get polluted, and what happens, we end up eating the fish and we ourselves that polluted. Amanda has talked about this a lot that we don't know that something we know and there's more research going on but the taking in of plastic, micro plastic, is this a big problem for the animals in the ocean - in my case, that's what I look at. And also the people who depend on the animals for food and nutrition. 

To me, micro plastic is almost like the virus, COVID, or omicron you know. It's so small that we don't see it yet we take it in and it's so destructive. So the animals in the ocean it's almost like that for them when it gets to the microplastic - they don't see the damn thing. They don't understand what it is. They swallow it and then it blows them apart. So think of Omicron and people and fish and whales and so on and micro plastic and you get the picture. With all our brains and all our technology, we don't know, we have been struggling to handle COVID. Can you imagine the animals in the ocean, what these little pieces are doing to their lives and to our ecosystem and to all that this ecosystem does for us people. I mean, we could talk for forever about the value of ocean ecosystems and terrestrial secoystem to us. When I think of climate and so on, and the animals moving up and down and micro plastic ends up really causing the headache, this is why we have to study this big time so that we understand how to reduce the durability of plastic. We make them safe, that when we use them they biodegrade or something, and they don't end up at this little micro-plastics that go and cause us so much pain.


Erica: Thank you, that's fascinating. I want to turn it a little bit to the UBC Microplastics Cluster. So you've both come into this cluster in different ways, and now we're looking ahead to the next term. Can you tell us a bit about how you got involved in the microplastics cluster?

Amanda: Sure. Yeah. So I have to say the microplastics are new to me. It's not something that I've studied in the past. And so when I was invited to join the cluster, I was really excited to have this opportunity to learn from my colleagues, because I think microplastics touch on a lot of the sort of impact assessment questions that I'm really interested in and that I've been working on for a long time but applied it in a different way. I think I mentioned some of the things earlier that I think make microplastics, or plastics in general, a really interesting and important science policy question and you know, these are common themes in, in my work and I was really excited to have this opportunity, especially to think about an issue that also has such important marine implications too, like working in the marine space is something that's newer for me.

And I think it comes down to really interesting questions of like, you know, how do we compare different kinds of evidence? How do we design interventions that do multiple things at the same time? How do we think about this like, really complex mess? Like plastics is a big thing, right? Plastics isn't just one thing. It contains multitudes. And so how do we think about designing you know, policy approaches to deal with something that's so, you know, heterogeneous and multifaceted?

I mean, so these are all things that really excite me. And when this microplastics cluster at UBC was being developed, one of the things I thought was really cool about it was that it was really bringing in people from throughout the lifecycle of plastics, from the people who are thinking about, you know, at the point of production to people thinking about, you know, different pathways through the environment, into the oceans, human health impacts. And it just seemed like such an exciting opportunity to be able to, you know, engage with colleagues across UBC.


Erica: Thank you. Why is it important to you to be doing this work in British Columbia?

Rashid: Plastic is a big problem? Nationally, we are one of the biggest per capita consumers of plastic products with big oil and gas company, and that's the initial place where the plastic raw materials come in and then go into the ocean. The economy is so important that the Canadian government has actually come to a decision to ban single use plastic. So that's how important it is in Canada. But again, as I like to say, Canada is not an island. We're connected to the global environment. And we do know that enough Canadians know that Canadian oceans, for example, or Canada alone cannot eliminate microplastic. It has to be linked to the to the global effort. And so having this kind of project at UBC given us the basic important interdisciplinary research that can benefit the policy both locally at B.C. level and nationally, and also globally actually, is important. In fact, the UN is negotiating now, I think within a year there's going to be a big United Nations conference on how to tackle plastic pollution. So we are just in time for doing this. And so I think this is a fantastic opportunity for us here.

Amanda: I think also BC is just a really interesting place to look at some of these ecosystem impacts when we think about, you know, the coastal ecosystems we have here, urban ecosystems, I think there's such an opportunity here to really use B.C as a, you know, a testbed to explore both, you know, what we're actually seeing in these complex different environments and then also potentially different kinds of interventions as well.


Erica: Yeah, those are both really great insightful answers. I want to ask you both about the next generation of scholars and decision makers. What role have students played in your research and where do you think research and policy need to go as we think about how we train and mentor people who are emerging in their careers now?

Rashid: This question is very dear to my heart, it's close to my heart, because I like to say that - no student no professor, I really see the strong connection to students and professors, and also the future - between now and the future. The future scientist, the future policymakers, the future problem solvers. So students are really, students and post-docs and research associate, I really don't joke with them anymore. I don't joke with them at all. And in our Ocean Canada partnership over 50% of our budget, 2.5 million from SSHRC, went to support student training. So this is important, and they are leaders. We have a book coming out hopefully this year, with UBC press by the way, we deliberately chose UBC Press as this is a UBC project, we wanted that to happen. And many of the chapters are actually led by our students and post-docs. Because this is really where the action is, you know, so this is very important.

Amanda: Yeah. I just want to echo things Rasheed said, you know, students and post-docs are the drivers of a lot of the research activity at the university. You know, these are the people who are leading a lot of the cutting edge work. You know, faculty, we spend a lot of time maybe and writing the grants doing the admin but it's really the ideas of the students and post-docs who are, you know, leading that research day to day and driving it forward. So I think it's so important to have a lot of involvement from, you know, this next generation of trainees. I think the other thing that is great that's coming from, you know, our trainees, whether they're students and postdocs, is that they're pushing for the kind of training that they want and need to be able to play the roles that they want to, whether that's in academia, in government, in civil society and industry, to address challenges like the plastics problem. And I think some of the things that they're pushing for in their training is things like increased interdisciplinarity, which is something that both Rashid and I talked about. If you're thinking about the plastics problem, for instance, it's so important to be able to appreciate, you know, different aspects of the problem and to be able to work in collaborative teams. And so creating opportunities to do that I think is is so important. I think another big dimension of that too is, you know, working with different kinds of collaborators and partners, not just in the university, but beyond the university. I think we've touched on working with governments and NGOs, industry. The skills to do that and the opportunities to practice that I think are also, you know, such a big part of what it means to train this next generation of researchers thank you.


Erica: Thank you. Rashid, what role do you think that economics should play in in the microplastics landscape moving forward?

Rashid: Yeah. The thing is, when you when you look at - and economics is very obsessed with this when it comes to environmental degradation and so - the key issue is that those who benefit from putting out plastic and microplastic in our environment run off with the benefit of doing so, and they leave the cost on other people, on the environment, on animals. So there is a mismatch between the benefits and the cost. Who enjoys the benefit and who bears the costs. And this leads us to the big thing that is happening now, which is good to see, is environmental justice, right? How do we make sure that this mismatch is closed? This disconnect is really brought together? How do we make sure that those who benefit are those who they pay for the cost so that they can internalize it in their decision making? Not run off with the billions and leave vulnerable people, less influential people, socially disadvantaged people, with the costs. And we can give examples of that, both in the developed and the developing world this is happening. And this is where I think economics, if allowed to be applied according to the theories we have, will actually help us set the incentives such that we let the polluter pay, which is the very old principle environmental economics, which is so difficult to implement because some of us have just decided that there's just no go, go, go for taxes, even though taxes are part of our policy tools and instruments, right. Subsidies are also, but they are the opposite of taxes. If somebody causes harm that they don't integrate in the activity, you tax them to balance that harm. If somebody creates goodies for society and other other people, you actually it's OK to subsidize on the side of so-called subsidies. So this is where I see a big role for economics in an integrated fashion with other disciplines. Because again, economics alone cannot do it, but it has that important special place.


Amanda: Yeah, and I think this kind of comes back also to the earlier questions, too, about, you know, like important places to shape policy. I think there are all these very, seemingly from the outside, unglamorous parts of the policy process that nevertheless have a ton of impact and I think these questions of you know, how do we count? What do we count? Who are we counting? How do we take into account uncertainty? How do we take into account those different perspectives? A lot of this is sometimes hidden from the public, or it's not necessarily what the public sees, but these sorts of decisions, whether it's an economic cost benefit analysis, frameworks or risk assessment frameworks, they're so impactful these assumptions and choices that we make. And I think that's one of the ways in which research is really important. But it's also really important that as researchers, we connect the impact of those choices, which can seem kind of, you know, technocratic or you know, questions of just economics or, you know, human health or science, to really illustrate what those impacts might be if we zoom out, right. You know, Rashid mentioned environmental justice. I think that's that's a great example of how a lot of times traditionally in the past, when we think about benefits of different kinds of environmental policies, we're really focused on the aggregate, like how everything adds together, but not really looking at who was winning and who was losing. And that that method of accounting or that method of making policy has led to some persistent, inequitable distributions, right. And so I think, you know, as we're thinking about tackling the plastics problem, this is such an exciting opportunity for us to rethink how we think about policy making in general. And really think critically about those sorts of, you know, analytical choices that feed into the policy process on sometimes not so transparent ways.

Rashid: Fantastic.


Erica: Thank you for listening to the podcast of the University of British Columbia Cluster for Microplastics, Health and the Environment. This cluster brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars aiming to support the development of informed policies regarding plastics pollution. UBC is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam First Nation on the Point Grey Campus and the Syilx Peoples on the Okanagan Campus. 

This episode was produced for the UBC cluster for Microplastics Health and the Environment by Hikma Strategies. I'm your host, Erika Machulak, working with Creative Director Sophia van Hees. This episode includes original music composed by Matthew Tomkinson, the 2022 Hikma Artist in Residence. This score interweaves musical notes and the crunching and clicking of plastic to evoke the omnipresence of microplastics throughout our ecosystem. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia.



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