Union of Concerned Scientists
At a press conference last year convened by the Union of Concerned Scientists, researchers concluded that a combination of increased extreme heat due to climate change and rising childhood obesity can prove lethal for high school football players. Both extreme heat and high humidity can put players at risk.
Fortunately, public health experts note that every exertional heat stroke death is preventable and national and state high school athletic associations have taken notice. Since last year, many have adopted new guidelines or policies aimed at protecting players from higher temperatures.
Football Riskier than Other Sports
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a study in August 2010 that concluded heat illness is the leading cause of death and disability among American high school athletes. The CDC estimated that heat stress is responsible for an average of more than 9,000 heat illnesses among high school athletes annually and that football players are 10 times more likely to experience heat illness than students who played the eight other surveyed sports.
According to a recent international climate change study, risks increase when exposure, vulnerability and extreme weather and climate events combine. In the case of high school football, exposure can increase when athletes participate in two-a-day practices at the beginning of the practice season, typically during the first week of August. Vulnerability is higher for more obese players and players who have not exercised over the summer. And climate change has made extreme heat more likely to occur, especially during the summer months.
Heat Waves Are Becoming More Common Due to Climate Change
Scientists expect heat waves such as the ones experienced last year and this year to become more frequent, intense and longer as heat-trapping gases from burning coal and gas and destroying tropical forests accumulate in the atmosphere. Overall, over the last decade, the U.S. has set twice as many record highs as record lows.
According to a U.S.federal scientific assessment, the average temperature in the U.S. has increased 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 50 years, while over the past 30 to 40 years, high-humidity heat waves have also increased. The assessment projected that staying on a business-as-usual path with regard to heat-trapping emissions would make extreme heat events that occurred just once every 20 years in the past happen every other year or annually throughout the country by the end of the century.
National and State Organizations Are Working to Better Protect Players
National and state organizations have responded to last year’s string of player deaths by adopting new positions and guidelines on heat acclimatization for high school athletes.
The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) released a new position statement this April. The statement emphasizes beginning training progressively, instituting rest breaks, reducing the amount of equipment athletes wear to avoid stifling in the heat, reducing practice intensity and duration as heat and humidity increase, and having well-defined and practiced emergency response plans in place, including on-site rapid cooling.
In October 2011, Texas’ University Interscholastic League, in which high schools participate, voted to bar two-a-day practices until after a four-day acclimation period. And in March, the Georgia High School Association adopted new policies that require schools to take wet bulb globe temperatures to determine how intense practice should be, a method pioneered by the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune.
Other states, including Arkansas, Connecticut, New Jersey and North Carolina, have also adopted protective policies over the past few years.
The Korey Stringer Institute (KSI) at the University of Connecticut works directly with states to improve their heat acclimatization policies. KSI maintains a list of state policies and rates them against its recommendations, which include limiting two-a-day practices as the preseason begins.
Visit EcoWatch's CLIMATE CHANGE page for more related news on this topic.
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.