Healthy Cities in the SDG Era

Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger aims to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
In this episode of Healthy Cities in the SDG Era, Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero will speak with two experts about the relationship between poverty and hunger, or insecure access to food, within both Canadian and global contexts. Discussions will also focus on underlying issues of systemic racism and social inequities, that lead to a disproportionate prevalence of hunger and food security amongst different social groups.
Dr. Valerie Tarasuk is a Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, cross-appointed to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her primary research focus is household food insecurity. She has led several tri-council research grants to elucidate the scope, nature, and health implications of this problem in Canada, assess the effectiveness of community responses, and determine how public policies and programs impact food insecurity prevalence and severity. In 2011, she led the establishment of PROOF, an interdisciplinary research program working to identify effective policy approaches and mobilize knowledge to reduce household food insecurity in Canada.
Allison Daniel is a PhD Candidate in Nutritional Sciences (in the Faculty of Medicine) and a student in the Collaborative Specialization in Global Health. Her research focuses on children with severe acute malnutrition requiring inpatient admission in Blantyre, Malawi. More specifically, she is interested in the pathways from maternal factors and care practices to child outcomes including development and nutritional status in severely malnourished children.

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Anwaar Baobeid. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, focuses on ensuring access to water and sanitation for all.

Professor David Meyer completed his PhD and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT and is an alumnus of Engineering Science (Energy Option) at U of T. Before his graduate studies, David worked for Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) in Ghana and for a engineering consulting firm called HydraTek in Toronto. His research focuses on urban water distribution infrastructure, and specifically how this infrastructure behaves in Mega Cities in the Global South. His research group works on projects including new ways of managing and modelling megacity water networks, especially when they turn on and off frequently. These intermittent systems affect one billion people! He also runs the Sensing Health In Toilets Lab (an acronym he is proud of) where they try to measure the health of a community from within its toilets.

Samantha LeValley is a first-year PhD Student in Civil Engineering in the Centre for Global Engineering at UofT. She completed her MASc in Civil Engineering at UofT in 2021 along with the Collaborative Specialization in Global Health. The goal of her PhD research is to understand how equitable current improved rural water supplies are and how that equity changes with seasonality and compares between two different contexts in the Global South.

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the DLSPH, U of T, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Sylvia Lorico. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at U of T.

SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities, focuses on reducing inequality within and among countries.
There is a stark wealth gap between the richest and poorest in Canada. According to a 2020 report from the Parliamentary Budget Office, the wealthiest 0.01% percent of Canadian families have a net wealth of $654 billion, which is 5.6% of the national total. The poorest 40% of Canadian families, on the other hand, have a net wealth of $132 billion, or, 1.1% of the national total.

This gap has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic – the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported that Canada’s top 20 billionaries have become $37 billion richer during the COVID-19 pandemic, earning an average of $2 billion each. This has happened alongside significant job losses amongst the working class.

Toronto has one of the highest costs of living of cities in Canada. The cost of housing, food, transit, childcare, and postsecondary tuition have increased significantly over the past three decades, while incomes have stagnated. The impacts of this drastic increase in the cost of living have had unequal impacts. Racialized groups, recent immigrants/migrants, and young people living in Toronto have become poorer over time, as these groups have not experienced income increases over the past 35 years. While income inequality is an important metric to consider when thinking about inequality, it is not the only one. In this episode, our guests approach the goal of Reducing Inequality from a more critical lens.
Dr. Roberta Timothy is an Assistant Professor in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, at the University of Toronto. Roberta is also co-founder and consultant at Continuing Healing Consultants, where she implements and teaches her intersectional mental health model “Anti Oppression Psychotherapy”. She specializes in the areas of intersectionality, critical human rights, and health ethics; health and race; transnational Indigenous health; and anti-oppression/anti-colonial approaches to mental health (including anti-oppression psychotherapy) and research methodology.
Amrita Kumar-Ratta is a third year PhD student in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is a student in the Collaborative Specialization in Global Health and South Asian Studies at U of T. Amrita’s research focuses on gendered and ethnoracial constructions of inequality, particularly on the geopolitics of marriage and fertility in Punjabi communities in Canada.
CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Anwaar Baobeid. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality, aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Its targets encompass ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls everywhere; eliminating violence against women and girls; recognizing and valuing unpaid care and domestic work; ensuring women’s participation and equal opportunities for political, economic, and public leadership; and ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights.
While the scope of inequality that SDG5 seeks to address is wide-ranging, there is a glaring omission in the very description of SDG 5: while it aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, it fails to explicitly acknowledge the inequities that gender-diverse individuals and sexual minorities experience on the basis of their social identities. Further, it does not explicitly acknowledge intersectionality, and how sexism interacts and intersects with other forms of oppression like racism, homophobia, and classism, to produce different lived experiences of inequality.
In this episode of Healthy Cities in the SDG Era, Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero speaks with two researchers that are working to improve the health and well-being of women and gender-diverse individuals with equity and intersectionality at the forefront.

Dr. Lori Ross is an Associate Professor in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Lori is also the leader of the Re:searching for LGBTQ Health Team. Lori uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches in her research work, with a strong focus on integrating the principles of community-based research. Much of her research focuses on understanding the mental health and service needs of marginalized populations including lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S+) people, in order to improve access to services for these communities.
Sireesha Bobbili is a PhD candidate in Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, U of T. She formerly worked as a Project Manager at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where she led projects focusing on improving mental health systems, both locally and abroad, to increase access for vulnerable and marginalized populations. Sireesha conducts global health research regarding mental health and substance use, violence against women, and public health policy.

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Anwaar Baobeid. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

SDG 15: Life on Land, focuses on sustainable management of forests, combatting desertification, halting and reversing land degradation, and halting biodiversity loss.

In this episode, Ophelia Michaelides speaks to two researchers that are working towards improving our understanding of zoonotic diseases, or, diseases transmitted between animals and humans. Discussions focus on unpacking what zoonotic diseases are; how social and environmental factors impact their spread; and the actions we can take at individual, national, and global scales to develop more sustainable prevention and mitigation strategies for managing zoonotic disease emergence.

Dr. Samira Mubareka is a virologist, medical microbiologist and infectious disease physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto. Samira has been working on SARS-CoV-2 since the outset of the pandemic in North America with a focus on virus biology, bioaerosols and exposure, genomics and diagnostics through close and cross-disciplinary collaborations across engineering, computational biology, molecular virology and animal health. Samira serves on the Chief Science Advisor of Canada, Dr. M. Nemer’s COVID-19 Expert Panel, the Implementation Committee of the Genome Canada-led Canadian COVID-19 Genomics Network (CanCOGeN) VirusSeq project, and the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table. She is currently focused on understanding the biology and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and on coronavirus zoonotic spillover. Samira holds an MD from Dalhousie University, completed training in Internal Medicine at McGill University, and specialized in Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology at the University of Manitoba.

Isha Berry is a PhD Candidate in Epidemiology at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is also a Fellow in the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security. Isha has expertise in infectious disease epidemiology and mathematical modelling and has experience conducting infectious disease research in low-, middle-, and high-income settings. Her primary area of research is understanding the socio-behavioral drivers of global emerging infectious diseases at the human-animal interface. She holds an MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a BSc in Environmental Science from McGill University.

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the DLSPH, U of T, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Sylvia Lorico. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at U of T.