Monday, May 5, 2008

[EQ] Poverty and Environment Indicators

Poverty & Environment Indicators

Report prepared for UNDP-UNEP under the Poverty and Environment Initiative

 

Coordinated by Flavio Comim
Capability and Sustainability Centre (CSC), University of Cambridge, 2008

 

Research Team CSC: Pushpam Kumar, Nicolas Sirven, Ely Mattos, Monica Concha, Esmeralda Correa, Carla da Silva, Philipe Berman

 

Available on-line as PDF file [44p.] at: http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/csc/research/UNDP_UNEPengD.pdf

 

"….Poverty-reduction cannot be achieved without taking into account the  environment. Degraded ecosystems increase hunger, exacerbating risks, diseases and taking children out of school. Efforts to reduce human poverty cannot ignore the role that changes in ecosystems play in shaping human lives. Indeed, the importance of addressing the links between poverty and environment has been widely acknowledged by governments, preparing their Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), and by international organisations, but full implementation of poverty and environmental strategies remains elusive."

 

"The challenge lying ahead consists in effectively developing concrete  mechanisms for monitoring poverty from an environmental perspective. One possible  solution for this challenge is the elaboration of Poverty & Environment Indicators that could be used in the formulation of Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS)."

 

Particular emphasis is given to health variables in understanding the links with ecosystem services. Relational health dimensions, such as 'reduction in life expectancy from unsafe water', or 'undernutrition from erosion risk' or 'death from diarrohoea from unsafe water' or 'death from intestinal infections from traditional fuel consumption' are incorporated into a human development framework.

 

The report is conceived as an introduction to the literature on human well-being and environment indicators at the same time that it proposes a new methodology for integrating health, education and standard of living dimensions with environmental variables…..’

This report is divided into four parts:

 

·         The first part introduces some well-known general indicators that relate human well-being dimensions to environmental conditions. Although not central to this report, an investigation of a sample of general indicators raises important practical issues in defining poverty & environment indicators.

·         The second part explores what recent studies have said about poverty & environment links, with the purpose of learning about the existence of concrete associations that might inform policy-makers about similar situations that might be going on in their own countries.

·         The third part presents basic definitions used to handle poverty & environment indicators, including criteria for choosing indicators and the use of scale scores to help making a decision.

·         Finally, the report describes a new methodology for elaborating poverty & environment indicators that solves some technical limitations of previous methodologies.

 

 

Content:
Executive Summary

Introduction

Poverty

Environment

How Essential is the Environment for Poverty Reduction?

Human Development and Ecological Footprint

The Structure of the Report

Reviewing Studies on Human Well-Being & Environment Indicators

The Ecological Footprint

The Environmental Sustainability Index

The Barometer of Sustainability

Human Development Indexes

Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare

Lessons Learned

Reviewing Studies on Poverty & Environment Indicators.

Environmental Conditions and Health

Ecosystems and Livelihoods

Environment and Potential Risks

Environmental Indicators for Local Stakeholders

Environment and the MDGs

Lessons Learned

Developing and Using Poverty & Environment Indicators

Measurement

Levels of Measurement

Criteria for Choosing Indicators

Theoretical Models

A New Methodology for Elaborating Poverty & Environment Indicators

The Theoretical Model

Adjustment Factors

Summary of the New Methodology on P&E Indicators

The Conceptual Model

The Applied Model

Regressions

Results: P&E Indicators

Notes

 

 

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