Situation Report

ecowatch.com - May 16, 2013

Launching today in Canada, Europe and the U.S., TarSandsRealityCheck.com presents up to date, accurate facts about Alberta’s tar sands to counter the high-level pro-oil sands lobbying ongoing in Canada, the U.S. and Europe around the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and Europe on the Fuel Quality Directive.

The digital campaign launches the same day Canadian Prime Minister Harper is expected in New York to address the Council of Foreign Relations and promote the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline. It also comes just days after the Canadian government launched a new website as part of its massive pro-tar sands PR campaign.

For the first time, world renowned economists, scientists and academics, including Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon from the University of Waterloo and Dr. Danny Harvey from the University of Toronto, have come together to present peer-reviewed, easy to understand facts about the tar sands that counter misinformation spread by the oil industry’s glossy PR machine.

This report, produced for policy makers and practitioners, gives the results of a two-year project funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) entitled ‘Game Theory and Adaptive Networks for Smart Evacuations’. The project brought together expertise from both the physical and social sciences to bring interdisciplinary work to bear on the issue of city evacuations in the 21st Century. In particular, issues of social media and mobile communications have revolutionised emergency management and evacuation policy and this was foremost in our minds when conducting the project.

City evacuations: preparedness, warning, action and recovery

Final report of the DFUSE project (41 page .PDF file)
(Game theory and adaptive networks for smart evacuations: EP/I005765/1)