2012 ENVR 401 Project Sign-Up

The project:

Dr. Mann is an oncologist who runs a lab at the Jewish General Hospital (Côte-des-Neiges métro).  Her work investigates the link between environment and human health, particularly as regards the potential for substances to be toxic to humans.  Dr. Mann is currently working on determining whether there is a link between tungsten exposure and breast cancer.  She has several research questions from which students can choose.  For example, Quebec is considering developing its sizeable tungsten deposits.  The question is whether there is adequate information concerning any health risks associated with different exposure levels for this substance.

To learn more about Dr. Mann and what she does:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnODsd6Gtd4

Dr. Mann is relatively new to Canada and Quebec.  She is still in the process of getting to know Canadian institutions (federal and provincial, public and private sector) that may have an interest in funding the type of research she does or in using her research results in practical applications such as the development of guides, standards, policies and regulations.  This project will allow you to meet someone who is doing cutting edge environmental research.  You will help that person sustain her research and make findings available to decision makers. In order to be helpful, you need to read up, think on your feet and think outside the box.  By the end of the term, you should be able to assess the relative advantages and disadvantages of doing Dr. Mann's work at her lab at the Jewish General in Montreal, as opposed to elsewhere. Subject to Dr. Mann's approval, your written findings could be made available to federal and provincial agencies studying the competitiveness of the Canadian university and medical research sector.

Project:  To research the role of auditors in advancing sustainable development, students will conduct a comparative study of Canadian (federal and provincial), U.S. and EU bodies that have auditing functions that bear on environmental issues.  These would include, in Canada, the Auditor General of Canada, the Commissioner for the Environment and Sustainable Development, parliamentary standing committees, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and provincial environmental commissioners.  One of the objectives of the project will be to identify similar institutions in the U.S. and the EU.  The research could be conducted in relation to one or more resource sectors, for example, offshore oil and gas development.

The project would involve determining:

• how to measure the success of an auditor's work
• what is required in order for an auditor (or auditing body) to function properly
• what are lessons learned from different jurisdictions
• what improvements can be made in Canada

Project description:The world is changing, largely through human actions: we have altered habitats, overused resources, and redistributed organisms, nutrients, and chemicals. These changes have resulted in large-scale physical effects (such as pollution and climate change) and biological effects (such as biodiversity loss, emerging infectious diseases, and species invasions) that have enormous societal impacts. Our activities, and the activities of industry influence the environment but are also dependent upon environmental services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). Yet at the same time, Canada needs these industries for a healthy economy and a prosperous society - $288 billion was directly generated from goods-producing sectors that utilized natural resources (Industry Canada publ. 2008). In brief, there is a need for an ecosystem management approach, which works with stakeholders, and integrates the activities of industry, society and the environment.

Currently, there is little coordination. Each industrial sector and individual stakeholder is essentially operating in isolation, despite their influence on one another through environmental modification. Arguably, potential avenues of cooperation should be explored to protect the health of our ecosystems while minimizing the economic impact on stakeholders. For instance, nutrient pollution, a byproduct of important industries (e.g., farming), can affect aquatic systems and the industries dependent upon those systems. Yet, the problem is not the nutrients themselves but their distribution in space and time. Too much in the wrong place results in biological responses, such as explosions of algae and other aquatic nuisance species (ANS), which can in turn result in hypoxia, fish die-offs, and other unwanted effects. Yet simultaneously, in appropriate doses, nutrients could help growth of shellfish; simultaneously, shellfish could improve water quality through their filtering activity and reduce the probability of hypoxic events. Moreover, the ANS themselves could potentially be recycled, providing a rich source of fertilizer or biofuels, reducing the need for energetically expensive, external sources of nutrients, and reducing the impacts of pollution. Further, this reduced energy requirement would reduce the carbon footprint, and thereby moderate the regional contribution to climate change.

Students signing up for this topic will be divided into two research groups on the first day of class. Each group will explore a different aspect of ecosystem management.

Project description:  Le Champ des Possibles is working to protect what they believe to be one of the most important green spaces in the Plateau. They have created a series of design propositions that would make this space an urban biodiversity reserve that would be linked to other such spaces in Montreal. Similar to Mont Royal, this space will be a place for Montréalers to touch and interact with nature right in their dense city.

The organization's belief is that we need to reclaim abandoned spaces like the proposed area in Montréal if we are to see more interesting flora and fauna come back into the city. This 'countryside in the city' is important for city-dwellers (especially kids), whom they feel are increasingly disconnected from the natural world. Catching bugs and amphibians should be a part of all kids’ lives, and the Champ will be a step in that direction. Numerous schools in the neighbourhood could benefit from such a space.

Le Champ des Possibles is currently looking for some greater expertise in certain key areas, one of which being in terms of biodiversity and ecological networks. Some of the projects they would like explored in this area include:

a. The establishment of a systematic, scientific approach to conducting annual inventories on the site. Le Champ des Possibles would like to track the importance of this site for its ability to support biodiversity and link to other such sites. To do so they need to track the evolution of the site in terms of the species it supports, and they need to do this is a more rigorous way. This requires methodological skills, an understanding of inventory work--yes, there's a literature on that from herbariums and museums and, for one or more of the students, some experience in database design.

b. A project using GIS and the geospatial web 2.0 to map other abandoned sites in the vicinity and to tie these into other networks of green spaces. The hypothesis is that these abandoned spaces could be used to encourage more flora and fauna back into central neighbourhoods, but to really work they would need to connect outwards to larger green spaces and the green belt. These connections need to be mapped. Here we are looking for students with some GIS and/or programming experience.

c. Another GIS possibility is to create a 'geodesign' of the site. The site currently is home to an impressive number of plant, insect and other species. These have all arrived without any intervention. Part of our larger project is to undertake some interventions on the site to make it more amenable to supporting flora and fauna. These interventions will largely consist of planting more indigenous species of plants, shrubs and trees. There will also be different forms of decontamination on the site that could result in more fertile zones of soil, better for plants. As well, there is a desire to install a pond on the site that could act as a holding and/or filtration site for rainwater run-off and as a way to encourage greater biodiversity in the area. The project will create a site selection process of the most sensible and important interventions in greater detail (e.g., types of species to plant, and schedule of interventions).

The organization is open to suggestions and ideas from students and professors. The most important aspect is to continue to improve the site in terms of its biodiversity and its importance for citizens.

Some relevant links:
Their Website
About Le Champ des Possibles
Their Plans and Summary Document

Knowledge of French is an asset to the project. Students signing up for this topic will be divided into two research groups on the first day of class. Each group will explore a different aspect of the project.

Project Description: The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) (www.aashe.org) is an organization dedicated to making sustainable practices the norm within higher education institutions. AASHE sees one of their roles as facilitating higher education institutional efforts in integrating sustainability into teaching, research, operations and public engagement. One of the goals of AASHE is to provide resources that will allow higher education institutions to be able to improve their sustainability performance. One such tool is the sustainability tracking, assessment and rating system (STARS) (https://stars.aashe.org). STARS is a self-reporting process designed to allow colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. STARS is designed to provide a framework that allows universities and colleges to use a common set of measurements to assess their current sustainability performance when compared to other higher education institutions and to use these measurements and comparisons as incentives to encourage universities and college to improve their sustainability efforts.

Thomson House is the home to the Post-Graduate Students' Society of McGill University (PGSS). The mission statement of the PGSS is to “optimally, responsibly and efficiently serve its members”, which includes administering Thomson house in the most optimal manner. As part of the growing movement within the McGill University community to improve its sustainability performance, the PGSS is currently undergoing a major audit of its day to day operations at Thomson House using the STARS framework. The audit is being carried out this summer by student interns in order to establish the current baseline performance of the day to day operations of Thomson House. The audit includes an analysis of the amount of waste being produced, the types, amounts and sources of food being sold, purchasing policies, greenhouse gas emissions and an eco-footprint of the infrastructure and operations as they currently stand.

This purpose of this research project is to examine and analyze the information of the current baseline performance of the day to day operations that is being created during this summer’s audit and to use the STARS framework to help design a step by step process that will allow Thomson House to improve on its sustainability performance and to continue to improve on its sustainability performance for a number of years in the future. There are many components to the STARS framework process and it may not be possible to examine every aspect of the day to day operations but this is a great opportunity for initiating substantive and sustainable change for this very important social structure within the McGill community.

Project Description: In 2011, the Ministry of Education mandated all universities to reduce their water usage by 10% by 2015 and by 20% by 2020, relative to 2011 levels. The challenge posed to McGill is manifold: beside the fact the Ministry will not allocate funding to encourage water conservation measures, there are no meters in place that would allow for an estimate of water usage on campus. Rough estimates place McGill’s water consumption somewhere between 1,200 and 2,700 million liters per year.

To tackle these issues, University Services hired an intern to estimate water usage on the downtown campus. Because of time constraints, the intern has focused on the largest and most research intensive buildings on the campus including the McIntyre Building, the Life Sciences Building and the Otto Maas Chemistry Building. This means many smaller and perhaps less water consumption intense buildings have not been included in the audit process. In addition, none of the buildings on the Macdonald Campus have been included in this first audit phase.

The water audit of a particular building requires several steps: 1) an analysis of floor plans of the buildings to count the different fixtures using water, 2) an analysis of data on mechanical systems from the Building Operations team, 3) a building walk-through to confirm the information gathered so far, and 4) to visit research labs and meet with researchers whose labs possibly require substantial amounts of water in their day-to-day operations. Once all these steps have been achieved, the information will be compiled to estimate the overall annual water consumption of the building. Assumptions are made based on guidelines provided by the Ministry (e.g., the average number of times a toilet is flushed daily, the number of hours a cooling tower is in operation).

While the audit team is striving to deliver as accurate as possible results, a number of questions remain unanswered. These include:

- How far off are the audits from the real water usage? There are potentially significant uncertainties with this aspect of the audit primarily because the fourth step of the audit process has proven to be the most difficult to accomplish. There is no way easy way to determine who the researchers are that use water for their research activities. At the moment our client, University Operations, is dependent on building directors to tell them who they think is using water for their research. Of course this means there may be laboratories or research groups that are not being included in the audit process.

- How much water do these buildings consume compared to the whole campus? The audit is focused on the buildings where it is thought that a significant amount of water is used on a daily basis. Trying to determine what percentage of the total water usage for the university is used by these buildings is difficult to determine. When you are trying to reach an overall percentage reduction for the whole university you need to have confidence that you are truly meeting these water consumption reduction targets in order to satisfy the Ministry of Education.

Our client is interested in trying to answer some of these questions. In addition, our client would like us to research strategies that are being used by other McGill comparator universities to manage and reduce their own water consumption. The idea of using comparator universities is that these institutions are similar in size from a structure and operations point of view and any water conservation models used at these institutions would likely be easier to implement at another similar institution like McGill. This type of research analysis could assist in developing a longer-term plan for reducing the overall day to day water consumption practices at McGill.

Project:  Developing a sustainable development plan to "green" the Town of Hampstead.

Project: McGill Food and Dining Services (MFDS) has communicated significant interest in quantifying their energy consumption and implementing measures to reduce their energy usage. By understanding optimal practices within kitchen operations and the advantages of Energy Star Appliances, MFDS wishes to improve the energy efficiency of their operations in McGill residences in the upcoming years. These efforts seek to build on past research and collaboration to develop solutions tailored to McGill’s context in an inclusive, holistic systems approach. This project may also serve as a nexus to enhance awareness of sustainability efforts, encourage student involvement, and collaboration with McGill staff.

Objective: MFDS will provide support for student researchers to assess both staff practices and the appliances in use in Royal Victoria Hall Cafeteria (RVC), whose cafeteria was fully renovated in 2009/2010, and Bishop Mountain Hall (BMH) whose facilities have not recently been upgraded.

The newly renovated RVC cafeteria has eliminated the use of steam heaters and is equipped with Energy Star Appliances, however, common staff practices have not yet been evaluated in terms of wasteful consumption of electricity and gas. A comparative evaluation of both facilities’ practices should be undertaken to compile a set of ‘best practice’ guidelines which will be used to inform the structural and social changes in other MFDS locations in and out of residences. In addition to primary research, interviews and on site observations to inform a McGill specific execution process, the research group may choose to suggest appropriate reduction targets for upcoming years.

Guiding Questions include:
• What is energy efficiency? How can it be applied into MFDS operations?
• How does energy usage vary between RVC and BHM when considering sales and the number of meals served?
• Does the physical layout of the kitchen and cafeteria space noticeably influence behavioural practices by students and staff (e.g. location of garbage, recycling, and compost receptacles)?
• Are there identifiable areas of poor energy efficiency within the cafeteria operations? If so, how can these areas be addressed to improve energy efficiency?
• What behavioural/organizational changes can MFDS employees make to reduce energy usage without requiring large scale structural renovations or appliance upgrades?
• Are students actively engaged in energy saving practices within the cafeteria/dining room context? If not, are there ways in which they can alter their habits to become more conscientious?

Possible Outcomes/Deliverables include:
• Determining a method of quantifying consumption and an analysis of energy usage within MFDS operations
• Development of a set of parameters outlining best practices in energy consumption that will be specific to the McGill residence context
• Recommendations regarding energy reduction targets and a detailed outline as to how these goals can be achieved
• Explanation of experiential process used to inform decisions and to establish the suggested criteria

Stakeholders:
• MFDS: Oliver De Volpi Executive Chef; Jancide Fillion, Unit Chef at RVC; Rene Picarella, Unit Chef at BMH
• McGill Residences Facilities and Buildings Operations: David Balcombe, Associate Director; Jerome Conraud, Energy Manager
• McGill Food Systems Project: Elana Evans; Sophie Silkes; Jason Wong
• McGill Energy Project: Marc-Etienne Brunet

MFSP will provide:
• Already compiled information regarding the project and energy usage on campus
• Contacts within MFDS and the Office of Sustainability
• Contacts with McGill Energy Project
• Contacts with Residences Facilities and Buildings Operations
• General guidelines and feedback throughout the project

Possible Methods include:
• Literature review of the industry, practices and appliances
• Primary research in the form of interviews with MFDS staff, relevant experts and professors (e.g. developing an audit to enable comparisons between the two sites)
• Possibility of installing additional temporary meters for gas, steam, and electricity
• Observation and evaluation of on site operations (e.g. spend a morning/afternoon in the cafeteria observing what appliances are on/off for what reasons, volumes of produce in fridges etc...)
• Assessment and analysis of electricity, gas and steam meters and their fluctuations over time, identifying peak times of consumption that warrant temporally-variable recommendations
• Meetings with various stakeholders throughout
• Final report and presentation