Application of Geospatial Methods in Evaluating Environmental Interventions and Related Socioeconomic Benefits

Environmental interventions underpin the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Rio Conventions. The SDGs are integrated and embody all three aspects of sustainable development—environmental, social, and economic—to capture the interlinkages among the three areas. The Rio Conventions—on biodiversity, climate change, and desertification, also intrinsically linked—operate in the same ecosystems and address interdependent issues, and represent a way of contributing to the SDGs. Assessing the results of environmental interventions and the related socioeconomic benefits is challenging due to their complexity, interlinkages, and often limited data. The COVID-19 crisis has also necessitated creativity to ensure that evaluation’s critical role continues during the crisis. Satellite and other geospatial information, combined with existing survey data, leverage open-source and readily available data to determine the impact of projects. Working with geospatial data helps maintain flexibility and can fill data gaps without designing new and often expensive data tools for every unique evaluation. Using data on interventions implemented by the Global Environment Facility in biodiversity, land degradation, and climate change, we present the application of geospatial approaches to evaluate the relevance, efficiency, and effectiveness of interventions in terms of their environmental outcomes and observable socioeconomic and health co-benefits.

From the Big Picture to Detailed Observation: The Case of the GEF IEO’s Strategic Country Cluster Evaluations

This chapter introduces strategic country cluster evaluations (SCCEs), a concrete example of how the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has dealt with the increasing complexity of GEF programming. This complexity reflects the interconnectedness—in terms of both synergies and trade-offs—between socioeconomic development priorities and environment conservation imperatives that is typical of many country settings in which GEF projects and programs are implemented, such as least developed countries and small island developing states. SCCEs address this complexity by applying a purposive evaluative inquiry approach that starts from aggregate analyses designed to provide trends and identify cases of positive, neutral, or negative change, and proceeds to in-depth data gathering aimed at identifying the specific factors underlying the observed change in those specific cases. By establishing the interconnectedness and sequencing of the various evaluation components, rather than conducting these in parallel, SCCEs provide an opportunity to focus on a limited set of purposively selected issues that are common in clusters of countries and/or portfolios. This enables a comprehensive understanding of the factors at play in complex national and local settings.

Can We Assume Sustained Impact? Verifying the Sustainability of Climate Change Mitigation Results

The purpose of this research was to explore how public donors and lenders evaluate the sustainability of environmental and other sectoral development interventions. Specifically, the aim is to examine if, how, and how well post project sustainability is evaluated in donor-funded climate change mitigation (CCM) projects, including the evaluability of these projects. We assessed the robustness of current evaluation practice of results after project exit, particularly the sustainability of outcomes and long-term impact. We explored methods that could reduce uncertainty of achieving results by using data from two pools of CCM projects funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

Staying Small and Beautiful: Enhancing Sustainability in the Small Island Developing States

Spread over the ocean regions of the Caribbean, the Pacific and Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the South China Sea, the small island developing states (SIDS) are a distinct group of developing countries often known for their rich biological diversity, oceans, tourism, and fisheries. The pressures on these and other natural resources is most immediate in the islands where the high vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, limited land and water resources, often unsustainable natural resource use, and other particular economic vulnerabilities are disrupting livelihoods. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the SIDS economies and livelihoods. Over the past 25 years the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has supported interventions in SIDS through $578 million in financing, in critical areas such as biodiversity protection, climate resilience, and energy access through renewable energy. But how effective and sustainable have these interventions been? What factors influencing the sustainability of GEF interventions can provide insights for future project design and implementation? This chapter draws on findings from a recent country cluster evaluation on SIDS conducted by the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the GEF. It presents the main environmental challenges in SIDS, the evidence on the relevance and effectiveness of GEF interventions in addressing these challenges, and the main risks to sustainability of outcomes. Important contextual factors that affect sustainability in SIDS include good policies and legal and regulatory frameworks, national ownership of projects, environmental awareness, institutional capacity, and strategic institutional partnerships. Project-related factors including good project design and adaptive project management, scaling-up and replication based on lessons learned, and a good exit strategy are also important for sustainability.

Evaluating for Resilient and Sustainable Livelihoods: Applying a Normative Framework to Emerging Realities

Evaluation has to reflect the evolving priorities of development and measure progress on their achievement. At the same time, evaluation must also incorporate newer demands from within the field such as increasing equity focus in evaluations, gender mainstreaming, and human rights. Environment and climate change became mainstreamed into the programming of development organizations following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and formation of financing mechanisms such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in 1991. This chapter reflects on how the Independent Office of Evaluation (IOE) of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) addressed the growing demands on the evaluation function in terms of incorporating concerns on environment and climate within existing methodological frameworks, and also adapting its methodology to meet internal and external evaluation demands. The chapter considers how evolving methodologies, methods, and tools have helped IFAD overcome these issues.

Overstraining international climate finance: when conflicts of objectives threaten its success

Purpose Climate finance is regularly not only seen as a tool to efficiently combat global warming but also to solve development problems in the recipient countries and to support the attainment of sustainable development goals. Thereby, conflicts between distributive and allocative objectives arise, which threaten the overall performance of such transfer schemes. Given the severity of the climate change problem, this study aims to raise concerns about whether the world can afford climate transfer schemes that do not focus on prevention of (and adaptation to) climate change but might be considered as a vehicle of rent-seeking by many agents. Design/methodology/approach Future designs of international transfer schemes within the framework of the Paris Agreement are to be based on experience gained from existing mechanisms. Therefore, the authors examine different existing schemes using a graphical technique first proposed by David Pearce and describe the conflicts between allocative and distributional goals that arise. Findings In line with the famous Tinbergen rule, the authors argue that other sustainability problems and issues of global fairness should not be primarily addressed by climate finance but should be mainly tackled by other means. Research limitations/implications As there is still ongoing, intense discussion about how the international transfer schemes addressed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement should be designed, the research will help to sort some of the key arguments. Practical implications There are prominent international documents (like the Paris Agreement and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) seeking to address different goals simultaneously. While synergies between policies is desirable, there are major challenges for policy coordination. Addressing several different goals using fewer policy instruments, for example, will not succeed as the Tinbergen Rule points out. Social implications The integration of co-benefits in the analysis allows for taking into account the social effects of climate policy. As the authors argue, climate finance approaches could become overstrained if policymakers would consider them as tools to also solve local sustainability problems. Originality/value In this paper, the authors will not only examine what can be learnt from the clean development mechanism (CDM) for future schemes under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement but also observe the experiences gained from a non-CDM scheme. So the authors pay attention to the Trust Fund of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) which was established with global benefit orientation, i.e. – unlike the CDM – it was not regarded as an additional goal to support local sustainable development. Yet, despite its disregard of local co-benefits, the authors think that it is of particular importance to include the GEF in the analysis, as some important lessons can be learnt from it.

Surviving the Anthropocene: How evaluation can contribute to knowledge and better policymaking

We live in the Anthropocene in which human impact on Earth is the dominant force. At the same time, humans are very much part of the ecosystem. This close interdependency is brought home by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as by anthropogenic climate change. Ecosystem health and human health are closely interlinked. Transformational change is required to avoid further catastrophes caused by the three environmental crises that human actions have caused: climate crisis; nature crisis; and pollution and waste crisis. Evaluation can contribute to finding durable solutions based on sound science and experiences from the field, but to do so evaluation must broaden its vision. Theory-based approaches will remain central, but they must be open to the full human and natural systems in which the intervention that is the evaluand operates. Evaluations must also pay attention to unintended consequences of all interventions to the environment, to social and power relations, to women, indigenous peoples and vulnerable groups. I identify three principles for evaluation in the Anthropocene, at the nexus of human and natural systems, and illustrate them using examples from evaluations from the Global Environment Facility: (a) integrating human and natural systems; (b) geographical approaches; and (c) addressing the drivers.

The Sargasso Sea Commission: An Evolving New Paradigm for High Seas Ecosystem Governance?

The Sargasso Sea is to be found within the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. Its borders are the major ocean currents. These boundaries shift with these currents, but there is a core area that covers approximately 2 million square nautical miles situated around the Bermuda archipelago, the majority of which is beyond the national jurisdiction of any State. Ten governments have now signed the 2014 Hamilton Declaration on Collaboration for the Conservation of the Sargasso Sea, which mandated the Government of Bermuda to appoint the members of the Sargasso Sea Commission—the first such body to take on a stewardship role for a high seas ecosystem. The Commission has committed to working with the existing international organizations with jurisdictional competences over a myriad of high seas activities. This paper will examine the work of the Commission and lessons learned over the past decade; it will discuss its possible role as a “boundary spanning” organization and look forward to its future in the light of recent grants from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Fonds Francais pour l’Environnement Mondial (FFEM).

Leveraging Global Partnerships to Achieve SDG 7: A Case Study of Pakistan

Energy is fundamental to socio-economic growth for the world; but how this energy is generated and distributed would determine whether the world could achieve a sustainable future. There is no denying the fact that energy is one of the primary sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Thus, addressing the climate crisis, sustainable energy lies at the core of both the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the Paris Agreement. Among other goals, SDG 7 calls for affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030 (UNDP, 2017). Globally, about 1.2 billion people lack access to electricity. The situation is more dire for clean cooking with about 2.8 billion people – 30% of the world’s population – lacking access (Sustainable Energy for All, 2020). The fact is that the energy use in developing countries would continue to increase (Catherine, Orie, & Paul, 2012). This growth could provide an opportunity for the deployment of renewable energy sources, as well as the creation of new, more efficient energy infrastructure. Unfortunately, for developing countries, the clean energy solutions are neither affordable nor accessible, even with the decline in the cost of renewable energy technologies. As a result, many global initiatives and partnerships, such as Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), Global Environment Facility (GEF) and Green Climate Fund (GCF) have been established and working towards achieving this goal (Global Environment Facility (GEF), 2017). However, there is still a need to emphasize and reinforce this partnership to achieve the universal energy access by 2030. The world community has developed many platforms and financing mechanisms to transfer the resources from industrialized nations to developing countries, such as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under Kyoto protocol (UNFCCC, 2012). However, these mechanisms have not been really effective in encouraging investments in clean energy due to low carbon pricing. Hence, this necessitates for international community to come forward for the development of innovative assistance programs for developing nations by investing more resources to achieve SDG 7. Therefore, to accelerate the clean energy transition, global parternerhips and technological platforms will be needed to make clean energy investment economically competitive and viable. This work presents a case study on Pakistan’s response to achieve the SDG 7 under the UN global mission of Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) program. It discusses the key milestones, barriers and lessons learnt on SDG 7. Based on the experiences of Pakistan, this work explores viable alternatives of financing mechanisms to accelerate sustainable energy. The paper concludes with key recommendations as to how global partnership could unleash the technological and financial opportunities in achieving ambitious and universal goals of sustainable energy.

A STUDY ON KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND PRACTICE REGARDING IMMUNIZATION, NEEDLE STICK INJURY AND USE OF PPE AMONG HEALTHCARE WORKERS INVOLVED IN DISPOSAL OF HOSPITAL WASTE IN A TERTIARY CARE HOSPITAL, HYDERABAD.

Environmentally Sound Management of Medical Waste in India (ESMWI) has been approved by Global Environment Facility (GEF) where the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India, is the national executing agency and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) is the implementing agency. The project aims to assist the country in safe and sound management and disposal of 180,000 tons of health care wastes generated annually which is approximately 484 tons per day