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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