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Science Deadline: Alcohol ads, record year for climate
Science Deadline: Alcohol advertising, record year for climate
TV sport prime time for
booze
New research adds to a call to ban
alcohol marketing and sponsorship from
sports.
University of Otago-led research, published today in the New Zealand Medical Journal, examined five televised sport events over the 2014-15 summer and found audiences were exposed to up to 200 alcohol ads per hour.
Lead author Associate Professor Louise Signal said that children should be protected from such marketing by banning alcohol sponsorship of sport.
“Sport sponsorship bypasses traditional marketing and gets around the current advertising codes,” she said. “Children see their sporting heroes linked with alcohol. In New Zealand, we have already agreed that alcohol should not be marketed to children by traditional marketing. Why should we allow it with sports sponsorship?
In an accompanying editorial, Australian researchers wrote that growing up with ubiquitous alcohol advertising and sponsorship could lead children to assume that drinking alcohol was “part of being a good New Zealander”.
Massey University's Professor Sally Casswell, who heads Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation (SHORE), said children continue to be exposed to alcohol marketing through sport - alongside other media, including social media.
"However, the focus on sports sponsorship by alcohol brands and retailers is important in a country like ours which is both strongly engaged with sport and suffers from considerable alcohol-related harm."
University of Otago's Professor Steve Jackson - who co-authored a report on alcohol marketing and sport for the Health Promotion Agency - said, globally, 60 per cent of alcohol televsion advertising spend was directed toward sport programmes.
A 2014 Cochrane Review of four studies investigating alcohol marketing and consumption found insufficient evidence to recommend for or against banning alcohol advertising.
Read expert reaction to the study and a summary of media coverage.
Quoted: Stuff.co.nz
"I think we worked out we spend about $20m a year in NZ putting kids under general anesthetic to treat the sugar addiction. To me it's totally unnecessary.
"But because we are
swimming in sugar as a society, that's the price we have to
pay."
Dr Simon Thornley
on an
Auckland school's nutrition policy that reduced the rate of
cavities caused by sugary drinks and
food.
2016 another scorcher of a
year
Last year was the hottest on record
since modern records began in 1909, according to Niwa's
annual climate summary.
Released on Monday, the summary showed that 2016 had beaten out 1998 as the warmest year based on its seven-station series, which began in 1909.
University of Otago honorary research fellow Dr Jim Salinger said the record mean temperatures were in line with the warmest year globally, which was confirmed last week by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.
“New Zealand and the globe trends reflect that the record greenhouse gases levels now are warming our climate," Dr Salinger said. "At the same time, the Southern Alps permanent ice volume has reduced to approximately a fifth of that in the late 19th century. These observations are all signals of accelerating global warming locally."
"This is very much a clarion call for action on both mitigating and adapting to climate change."
Writing for The Spinoff, Victoria University of Wellington's Professor James Renwick said it was easy to understand desperation in the face of climate change.
"We as a global community will decide, over the next half dozen electoral cycles, what the world’s coastlines will look like for millennia to come. Yet many are still arguing whether or not anything much is happening and whether we need to act at all."
"Despair may be a natural response to all this, but despair is not a constructive frame of mind," he wrote. "Now is the time for concerted action, for tackling emissions in all countries, all communities."
Read expert reaction to the Niwa annual climate summary.
Policy news & developments
Pill recommendations: The Medicines Classification Committee has recommended that selected oral contraceptives be re-classified to allow pharmacists to supply the pill in certain circumstances.
Gisborne conservation: Four conservation projects have been funded in Gisborne through the DOC Community Fund.
Natural hazards monitoring: Prior to Christmas, initial funding of $3 million was announced to develop and enhance GeoNet's natural hazards monitoring capability and response service.
NZ in international
news
New Zealand has featured in two
prominent science news stories this week, looking at
Predator Free NZ and the soon-to-launch Rocket
Lab.
The Wall Street Journal this week covered California-based company Rocket Lab and the launch site on Mahia Peninsula, which is scheduled to start test launches early this year.
Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told the paper that launch ranges in the United States didn't allow the frequency of launches the company was after. "A small island nation in the middle of nowhere," he said, "is pretty much exactly what you want".
Another ambitious project - Predator Free NZ 2050 - was highlighted in a Nature feature this week. Through interviews with some of the top scientists in the subject - including University of Auckland's James Russell and Landcare Research's Daniel Tompkins - the feature delved into the ins and outs of what it could take to rid New Zealand of invasive predators.
The Wall Street Journal: The
Best Place on Earth to Fire 3,000 Rockets Into Outer Space
Is... Nature News:
Science Media Centre NZ
Our aim is to promote accurate, evidence-based reporting on science and technology by helping the media work more closely with the scientific community.
The Science Media Centre is New Zealand's only trusted, independent source of information for the media on all issues related to science. Thousands of news stories providing context from and quoting New Zealand researchers have been published as a direct result of our work.
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