Finally, a system must be established to monitor the results of the interventions. A study in India found that environmental causes were responsible for 20 percent of the disease burden (about the same as malnutrition). The UK Department for International Development (DFID) defines “livelihood” as comprising “the capabilities, assets and activities required for a means of living.
Environmental conditions contribute in many ways to people's economic opportunities, especially in rural areas.4 The relationships are site-specific and often difficult to quantify: the extent of soil erosion may have no immediate effect on people's well-being, or it may reduce their economic opportunity. considerably.
Environment and security
The CAMPFIRE project in Zimbabwe, the Lupande project in Zambia, and the Herero Community Guards project in Namibia are examples of projects that aim to provide local groups with an economic rationale for conservation. 7. A recent study by the World Bank (Christie and Compton 2001) points out that 80% of the world's poor live in 12 countries, and that in 11 of these, tourism is significant and/or growing. Of the 100 poorest countries, tourism is significant in almost half of the low-income countries and almost all of the lower-middle income countries.
The ability of the poor to protect their consumption was more limited than that of the non-poor. Micro-level environmental shocks affect smaller numbers of people, both in rural and urban areas. Because poor people tend to live in more marginal areas, their homes and land may be more susceptible to drought, floods, landslides, subsidence, disease and the like.
Qualitative studies of poor people's perceptions of poverty clearly show the disruption, health damage and economic costs of the effects of poor people's vulnerability to micro-level environmental shocks. Women are often particularly vulnerable and will be most likely to bear the consequences of reduced food consumption, disease and shelter rebuilding. Environmental refugees are pouring into megacities, where they increase the number of poor people living on marginal and sometimes disaster-prone lands.
Environment and empowerment
At the heart of this project is the empowerment of the poor, as villages are given management authority over local forests on a 60-year franchise from the government. The project staff notes that "ownership of the project by the people is essential to the project's success." The project also provides training in literacy and accounting, and villagers are responsible for settling any disputes over rights to forested areas. Any attempt to empower local communities and direct public expenditure towards them must take into account these relations of inequality, but also the interests of different segments of the community.
In villages in the arid region of Vidarbha, Maharashtra, India, women and girls on foot spend most of the day walking to fetch water for a family. Women formed alliances with female members of the local village council (panchayat), held protest marches and performed street plays. As a result of the women's efforts, within six months, 17 community wells were dug in 8 villages and drinking water pipes were installed in 2 villages.
A critical mass of community members must understand the potential benefits of the scheme and participate in setting the rules of the project. The community must have a sense of ownership of the resource, believing that it is theirs to manage and maintain for the long term. In fact, the opposite may occur, as stated in the World Bank's 1991 Forestry Strategy Assessment: "Devolution of power to the local level has increased the pressure on forests for the income, employment and revenue needs of local governments and their constituents" (World Bank 2000). .
3 Environmental Contributions to the PRSP
Understanding the environmental contribution to poverty reduction
- Environment and health
- Environment and economic opportunity
- Environment and security
- Environment and empowerment 8
- Collecting and analyzing information
Percentage of poor people who are directly dependent on natural resources for their livelihood and during times of crisis. Changes in NR quality such as soil quality, vegetation, availability of game, fish and other important nutritional sources in nature. They focus on issues of concern to poor people, and involve poor people.
The link between environmental degradation and poverty can never be fully characterized by the available data. In the longer term, it will be important to put in place the means to improve data collection to cover key priorities, for example by adapting ongoing survey instruments, coordinating ongoing research or commissioning new studies. In addition, the HNP poverty fact sheets can provide valuable information on many environmental characteristics associated with poverty (See the Health, Nutrition and Population Chapter).
The issues and relationships we highlight in this section are complex and vary according to circumstances and over time. Therefore, it would be wise to quantify whenever possible and rely on qualitative research methods in circumstances not amenable to quantitative data collection. The PRSP could then introduce systems to quantify the key variables at later stages.
Choosing the most effective public action
- Prime areas of intervention
- Assessing expected costs and benefits
- Cost-efficiency analysis
Policies to reduce vulnerability can also include emergency income transfers, access to insurance and microcredit (see the chapter on social protection). While many costs, and especially benefits, may be uncertain, cost-benefit analysis offers a systematic way to consider the best available information in a coherent format. Actions to reduce health damage can be valued by (i) productivity gains among the affected population; (ii) savings in medical costs; or (iii) by measuring the willingness to pay (WTP) for the improvements among the affected population.
The benefits of public interventions to reduce vulnerability can, in principle, also be evaluated by the costs of avoided harm. With some exceptions11, cost-benefit analysis has not taken much consideration into the principles of rigorously capturing the distributional consequences of interventions, i.e., for each intervention, the expected poverty impact must be assessed; (i) the percentage of benefits accruing to the poor and (iii) the value of benefits to the poor relative to household income or consumption. 12.
The cost-benefit analysis of government actions should take into account the fact that there are important synergies between sectors. That is an example of a sensitivity analysis, which should be part of any cost-benefit analysis. Often a full assessment of the benefits of an intervention is not feasible, but consideration of cost-effectiveness is possible and remains important.
Monitoring outcomes and evaluating interventions
In the context of the PRSP, it would be important to collect data by income group, e.g. The role of each indicator level is to provide signals about the effectiveness of the intervention. Perhaps pollution concentrations are not falling because of a sudden increase in the vehicle fleet, so that total fuel demand compensates for the increase in the average "cleanliness" of each unit of fuel.
This is a signal that further analysis is needed to increase the effectiveness of the intervention. The analysis may show, for example, that the rich absorb all the benefits of the intervention or that other sources of ARI are increasing. In the latter case the difficult task of assessing how the situation would have been in the absence of the intervention (counterfactual) may be required.
The complexity of choosing indicators in the related field of water and sanitation is illustrated in the box below. A study from Mali found that people found the safe water "bland" and only used it in the dry season, when they could not get river water. In summary, M&E from an environmental perspective is best integrated closely with the overall framework for monitoring the progress of the PRS.
4 Lessons from Early Interim and Full PRSP
Good Practice
- Issues in focus
- Poverty-environment links
- Response systems
- Process
The Kenya IPRSP presents a description of environmental issues related to land use and water and proposes strategies, monitoring indicators and costs of implementing land use, water and energy strategies. The IPRSP for Rwanda notes that the majority of energy consumed by the poor is in the form of firewood. A third of the water infrastructure does not work, and poor households cannot afford to pay for drinking water.
Some of the issues explored by PRSPs and their perspectives on the links between poverty and the environment that provide useful insights into policy analysis and implementation are as follows. In the context of water, the PRSP notes that “the incidence of water rights violations, conflict and pollution has increased dramatically.” A rate increase program is underway to ensure the utility's financial viability, taking into account the ability to pay of poor households.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia lacked access to the cheap energy resources of the former centralized economy. The privatization of the electricity market increased the energy tariff by 2.4 times to about 1/5 of the average monthly household income. To limit the impact of climate change on food security and incomes of the poor, the Government of Mauritania intends to promote early warning systems and implement rapid response mechanisms.
Safe water and sanitation more often reduced the severity of the diseases than the incidence. It finds that diseases related to water supply and sanitation are responsible for 11% of the total disease burden, and diseases related to indoor air pollution are responsible for another six percent. This article provides an overview of the literature and current thinking on environmental health issues in developing countries.
It includes estimates of the total burden of disease attributable to the environment for different regions of the world. His argument is that the decline of CPRs, partly a result of privatization of CPRs, results in the subsequent impoverishment of the poor. No date: Environmental rights in Mkambati: Subsistence, social institutions and environmental change on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape.
Albala-Bertrand finds that the magnitude of the negative effect of disasters decreases with development, although vulnerability increases during the transition period from simple to diversified economies. The authors' empirical work suggests that the correlation between the level of economic development and the magnitude of the impact of a drought is not linear. The study covers environmental risks in ten of the world's major cities, some of which have already experienced repeated devastating earthquakes, storms, floods and fires.
The authors conclude that the natural disaster potential of the largest cities is expanding at a rate that far exceeds the rate of urbanization. Bhatt writes about poor women in the villages and rural areas of the Indian state of Gujarat who face a wide range of dangers, natural and man-made.