Amid greater climate impacts, there's new national support for the mental health of farmers

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This week:

• There's new national support for the mental health of farmers
• How graphics help us understand global warming
• Winter storms are becoming bigger around the Great Lakes. Here's why

Amid greater climate impacts, there's new national support for the mental health of farmers

What On Earth14:33Amid greater climate impacts, there's new national support for the mental health of farmers

Farming is a challenging profession at the best of times, made more so in recent years by climate change. But a new national centre aims to fill the gaps in mental health support for farmers across the country.

The Canadian Centre for Agricultural Wellbeing (CCAW) is a collaboration between researchers and mental health professionals looking to expand access to counselling and develop new resources for people in agriculture.

"With their unique stressors and unique schedules, we need something that's going to be able to be offered when [farmers] can get it, where they can get it," said Deborah Vanberkel, chief programming officer of the CCAW, in an interview with What On Earth host Laura Lynch. 

Research shows that farmers are at higher risk for mental health concerns than the general population, due in part to the unpredictable, uncontrollable nature of the profession. 

Vanberkel is a registered psychotherapist and dairy farmer in Odessa, Ont., as well as the founder of Ontario's Farmer Wellness Program, which began in 2019. She said calls to her practice typically increase in February, as planting season approaches. "That anxiety starts to kick in because [farmers] don't know what's going to happen." 

Extreme weather, drought and excessive rainfall caused by the changing climate are increasing farmers' worries, said Vanberkel. "Nobody knows what the weather looks like or what the weather is going to entail," she said. "Are we going to have enough water or are we going to have enough snow so that the watershed is going to be OK?"

Vanberkel said that daily chores can make it impossible for farmers to attend in-office weekday counselling appointments. Phone appointments outside normal office hours are part of the solution, she said.

"If they want to come in face-to-face, we'll have that conversation, too. But a lot of times I am having conversations with people while they're in the field, while they're working," she said. 

"I have a lot of clients who I have conversations with in the combine, in the tractors."

To address extreme stress caused by climate-related disasters, the CCAW is working with the federal government to develop a mental health resource geared towards catastrophic events. 

According to CCAW CEO and lead scientist Briana Hagen, a newly announced partnership with Telus Health will allow the CCAW to provide clinical support and community programs across the country by using the company's existing virtual care platform. 

The pressure to carry on a family legacy, the interpersonal conflict that comes with running a family business and a general culture of stoicism also contribute to farmers' stress, said Vanberkel. 

Stigma can be another barrier, she said. She hopes the new centre will normalize conversations about mental health and help farmers "talk about our mental health like we talk about the weather."

"We talk about the weather all the time," she said. "Farmers are notorious [for that]."

Vanberkel and her colleagues plan to launch an agricultural literacy program to teach mental health professionals what farmers experience and what support they need. 

Being open about mental health will help farmers cope with the increasing impacts of climate change, she said. 

"It's a matter of looking at what things are coming in the future … so that we can make sure that people get the services and resources that they need."

— Rachel Sanders

For more information on the Canadian Centre for Agricultural Wellbeing, click here.

Reader feedback

Last week, Emily Chung wrote about a variety of designs for wind generation in cities, a counterpoint to the large turbines that have come to symbolize this type of renewable energy. Readers had thoughts:

Jim Dyck:

"I have stood at the base of those massive wind turbines on a mildly breezy day (in Moosomin, Sask.). The blades were rotating strongly and steadily. Only a gentle swishing sound reached my ears…. Please, do not call these turbines noisy! These are beautiful and soft-operating, massive machines — gentle giants!"

Ingo Oevermann:

"One of the innovative manufacturers of vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) not mentioned is Oy Windside (based in Finland). I think their combination of a small VAWT with solar panels to power LED streetlights is absolutely brilliant. Imagine our town/city streets NOT festooned with millions of miles of expensive/unattractive wiring."

Birgitta Jansen:

"These different wind turbine designs may look promising but what is the environmental impact? How do birds deal with the various models? [Editor's note: Several of the companies specifically advertise their designs as bird- and bat-friendly.] What is the lifespan of these? Recyclability? For example, the blades of the commercial wind turbines that are already in use are made of Fiberglas and cannot be recycled. They do not degrade, either. We also know that various ingredients that are used in the turbines' mechanisms are rare earth minerals, which have to be mined. Mining has its own serious issues. And so on.

"With every new technology that is in development, or has been developed, we need to learn to ask ourselves: what will the environmental impact be of this? We know that there really are no 'externalities' that we can ignore. Well, we can ignore them, but at our peril."

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. This week: Do you have questions about heat pumps? Let us know.

Old issues of What on Earth? are right here. 

CBC News has a dedicated climate page, which can be found here.

Also, check out our radio show and podcast. This week, we hop in a fishing boat on the North Atlantic Ocean to investigate the crucial role of the seas in capturing carbon from our atmosphere. What On Earth airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET, 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.

The Big Picture: Visualizing climate change

If your eyes tend to glaze over at statistics and line graphs, feast your eyes on the visualization above. It's the work of U.K.-based climate scientist Ed Hawkins, who this week published a series of maps, one for every year since 1850. The colours show anomalies — that is, global surface temperatures that are hotter or cooler than norms established between 1961 and 1990.

As Hawkins pointed out in an interview with CBC News, "You see virtually the entire planet being red in recent years."

Hawkins is also the creator of the famous climate stripes graphic (known by the hashtag #ShowYourStripes), and said he was inspired to start creating data visualizations after he realized how much confusion there was around climate change. "The aim is to try to communicate the changes we're seeing as simply as possible, so that people can take one look at a graphic and understand what it's representing."

Hawkins shared this latest graphic after the release of the annual global temperature rankings (established by both the Copernicus Climate Service and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which found that 2022 was either the fifth- or sixth-warmest year on record (depending on how you crunch the numbers).

There have always been temperature variations, caused by events like volcanic eruptions or the warming effect of the 1878 El Nino phase, but the maps reveal a sharp and exceptional increase over the last few decades. Hawkins hopes his graphics help a wider audience understand why it's so important to cut CO2 emissions.

"The science is very clear. We know that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is warming the planet."

— Jaela Bernstien

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• This week, CBC News profiled residents in a Toronto neighbourhood who have banded together to make it easier to retrofit their homes to reduce their carbon emissions. Called the Pocket Change Project, it may yield lessons for other Canadian communities.

• An annual list has been released to showcase companies developing green technologies. Fourteen Canadian companies made the Global Cleantech 100. You can read summaries of what they do here.

• As automakers scramble to develop electric SUVs, here's why Citroën's CEO thinks the EV transition will actually kill demand for boxy light trucks. 

• We've all heard about off-grid homes in the countryside. But is it possible to go off-grid in the city? A sustainability guru in Manhattan tried it and shared his experience.

   

Why winter storms are becoming bigger and badder around the Great Lakes

Ontario was hit by a massive storm during the holiday season, and while it was driven by a number of weather events, a major contributor to the heavy snowfall was what's known as the "lake effect."

This is a relatively rare phenomenon that can only occur in a few places around the world with large enough bodies of water — such as the Great Lakes. 

The Great Lakes, which hold more than 20 per cent of the world's freshwater, are particularly prone to lake effect storms — as those who live in communities on the shoreline will tell you. 

A lake effect snowstorm occurs under specific conditions: when cold air passes over a relatively warm body of water. The air picks up moisture and heat from the lake, which causes the newly warmed air to rise. High in the atmosphere, the moisture then cools and condenses and starts to fall as snow. 

Importantly, the temperature difference must be at least 13 C — and there needs to be open water for the system to pick up moisture. 

Since Canada's prevailing winds come from the west or northwest, and cold air typically comes down from the Arctic, communities like Thunder Bay, Hamilton or Toronto — situated to the north or west of a Great Lake — are often spared the worst of lake effect storms. 

Communities directly east of a Great Lake are often hit much harder. 

While lake effect snowfalls can travel relatively far over land — for instance, storms generated over Lake Huron can reach Toronto — the storms become less severe the farther they travel. Instead, places like Hamilton and Toronto are most at risk of heavy snowfalls when winds come from the southeast and pass over Lake Ontario. Last month's storm was generated by a cold wind from the southwest. 

The window for lake effect storms is typically at the start of the winter season, when the Great Lakes are warmest and before they freeze over. But that window may be growing, as modelling suggests those conditions could become more common as the climate changes. 

As the planet warms, most of Canada will see reduced snowfall due to warmer temperatures. But communities along the Great Lakes could be an exception, said Adam Burnett, a professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., who has studied the lake effect. 

"As the climate warms, we're going to have ever-warmer lake temperatures and less ice cover. That's going to create an opportunity for more evaporation of water into the overlying air as cold air moves across. That is an ideal setup for lake effect snow."

Basically, it's a recipe for bigger, more intense lake effect snowfalls, Burnett said. 

Although broad-scale modelling doesn't always capture the lake effect, local models can. David Wright, a Michigan-based scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, helped build one such model. 

Using data from a lake effect snowstorm in 2009, Wright and his colleagues modelled what the storm would have looked like under different lake conditions. 

Among other conclusions, they found that if the lake was just 3 C warmer and ice-free, the areas the storm hit hardest could have been more than three times larger. 

Of course, this assumes everything else is held constant, which wouldn't be the case as the planet warms. 

Both Wright and Burnett made it clear that if temperatures continue to climb, after a few decades, we may not see the cold air necessary to generate snow — leaving us with intense lake effect rainstorms instead. 

— Darius Mahdavi

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Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty