Showing posts from category community-based.
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Leona D’Agnes on Evaluating PHE Service Delivery in the Philippines
›“By reducing population growth, we are going to have a better chance of sustaining the gains of an environmental conservation project,” said Leona D’Agnes in this interview with ECSP. D’Agnes, a technical advisor to PATH Foundation Philippines, served as lead author on a research article published late last year in Environmental Conservation titled, “Integrated Management of Coastal Resources and Human Health Yields Added Value: A Comparative Study in Palawan (Philippines).” The study provided concrete statistical evidence that integrated development programming incorporating population, health, and the environment (PHE) can be more effective in lowering population growth rates and preserving critical coastal ecosystems than single-sector development interventions.
“What set this research apart from earlier work on integrated programming was the rigorous evaluation design that was applied,” said D’Agnes. “What this design aimed to do is to evaluate the integrated approach itself. Most of the previous evaluations that have been done on integrated programming were impact evaluations — they set out to evaluate the impact of the project.” This most recent research project, on the other hand, sought to evaluate the effectiveness of cross-sectoral interventions based on “whether or not synergies were produced,” said D’Agnes.Although it took her team six years to generate statistically significant findings in Palawan, D’Agnes reports that the synergies of PATH Foundation Philippines’ PHE intervention took the form of reduced income poverty, a decreased average number of children born to women of reproductive age, and the preservation of coastal resources, which helped bolster the region’s food security.
Going forward, D’Agnes said, an integrated approach to environmental conservation should also prove appealing because of its cost effectiveness. “This has huge implications for local governments in the Philippines, where they are struggling to meet the basic needs of their constituents in the face of very small internal revenue allotments that they get from the central government,” she said. “They can really pick up on this example to see that at the local level, if somehow they can do this integrated service delivery that was done in the Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management (IPOPCORM) model, that they’ll be able to achieve the objectives of both their conservation and their health programs in a much more cost-effective way, and, in the process, generate some other [positive] outcomes that perhaps they didn’t anticipate.”
D’Agnes expects the study’s results will prompt a fresh look at cross-sectoral PHE programming. “I hope that this evidence from this study will help to change the thinking in the conservation community about integrated approaches to conservation and development,” she said.
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Nepal to East Africa: Population, Health, and Environment Programs Compared
›“Practice, Harvest and Exchange: Exploring and Mapping the Global, Health, Environment (PHE) Network of Practice,” by the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Institute and the USAID-supported BALANCED Project, explores the successes and challenges of their global population, health, and environment (PHE) network (with a heavy presence in East Africa). In order to increase support of the nascent PHE approach, the network seeks to shorten the “collaborative distance” between “PHE champions,” so they can develop a stronger body of evidence for the links between population, health, and the environment. In their analysis, the authors write that the network has facilitated the development of independent, information-sharing relationships between “champions.” However, they also observed shortfalls in the network, such as its limited reach into less technologically advanced yet more biodiverse regions, its bias toward BALANCED meet-up event participants, and its exclusion of those experts unlikely to be included in published works.In “Linking Population, Health, and the Environment: An Overview of Integrated Programs and a Case Study in Nepal” from the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, Sigrid Hahn, Natasha Anandaraja, and Leona D’Agnes provide both a broad survey of the structure and content of programs using the PHE method and an in-depth case study of a successful initiative in Nepal. Hahn et al. praise the Nepalese program for simultaneously addressing deforestation from fuel-wood harvesting, indoor air pollution from wood fires, acute respiratory infections related to smoke inhalation, as well as family planning in Nepal’s densely populated forest corridors. “The population, health, and environment approach can be an effective method for achieving sustainable development and meeting both conservation and health objectives,” the authors conclude. In particular, one benefit of cross-sectoral natural resource and development programs is the inclusion of men and adolescent boys typically overlooked by strictly family planning programs. -
Ecological Tourism and Development in Chi Phat, Cambodia
›Chi Phat is a single-dirt-road town nestled in the Cardamom Mountains of Southwestern Cambodia, one of the largest intact forests in Southeast Asia. The town is only accessible by two routes: a three-hour river boat trip up the Phipot River or, if the road isn’t flooded by the rainy season, an exhilarating 30-minute motorbike ride from Andoung Tuek, a blip on the one paved road that runs along Cambodia’s southwestern border. Since 2007, Wildlife Alliance has been running an ecotourism project in Chi Phat (full disclosure: I used to work for Wildlife Alliance in Washington, DC).
The project has been featured in The New York Times and since its inclusion in the Lonely Planet travel guide, has become a destination for backpackers looking to leave the beaten path. I recently visited the project after spending time in neighboring Vietnam and was struck by the contrast between the densely populated and urbanized Mekong Delta and the visibility of rural poverty in Cambodia.
“Cambodia’s contemporary poverty is largely a legacy of over twenty years of political conflict,” reads a 2006 World Bank Poverty Assessment. The Pol Pot regime’s agrarian collectivization forced millions into the countryside and as a result, even in today’s predominantly-urban world, Cambodia remains 78 percent rural. Today 93 percent of Cambodia’s poor live in rural areas, two thirds of rural people face food shortages, and maternal and reproductive health outcomes in the country lag far behind those in the cities. Chi Phat and the sparsely populated northeast have over ten or twenty times the rate of maternal deaths of Phnom Penh.
A Town Transformed
Before Wildlife Alliance began the Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) project in Chi Phat, most villagers made a living by slash-and-burn farming, illegal logging, and poaching endangered wildlife. Wildlife Alliance Founder and CEO Suwanna Gauntlett described the ecological zone around the town as “a circle of death,” in an audio interview with New Security Beat last year.Now, Chi Phat is a rapidly growing tourism destination offering treks and bike tours. In 2010 they brought in 1,228 tourists – not huge by any means, but over twice the number from 2009. The town now boasts a micro-credit association, a school, and a health clinic that offers maternal and reproductive health services. The village is also visited by the Kouprey Express, an environmental education-mobile that provides children and teachers with lessons, trainings, and materials on habitat and wildlife protection, pollution prevention, sustainable livelihoods, water quality, waste and sanitation, energy use, climate change, and adaptation.
One villager, Moa Sarun, described to me how he went from poacher and slash-and-burn farmer, to tour guide, and finally, chief accountant:Since I have started working with CBET, I realize that the wildlife and forest can attract a lot of tourists and bring a lot of income to villagers in Chi Phat commune. I feel very regretful for what I have done in the past as the poacher…I know clearly the aim of CBET is to alleviate the poverty of local people in Chi Phat, so I am very happy to see people in Chi Phat have jobs and better livelihoods since the project has established.
It’s hard to imagine what the town would have looked like before Wildlife Alliance arrived. The visitor center, restaurant, and “pub” (really, a concrete patio with plastic chairs and a cooler filled with beer), together make up nearly half of the town’s establishments. For two dollars a night, I stayed in a homestay and lived as the locals do on a thin mattress under mosquito netting, with a bucket of cold water by the outhouse for a shower, and a car battery if I wanted to use the fan or light (but not both). These amenities place Chi Phat above average for rural Cambodia. According to 2008 World Bank data, only 18 percent of rural areas had access to improved sanitation and only 56 percent had access to an improved water source.
Poaching Persists
Real change has certainly hit Chi Phat, but illegal activities persist, as a Wall Street Journal review of the project noted. In one Wildlife Alliance survey, 95 percent of members participating in the project made less than 80 percent of their previous income and 12 percent of people made less than 50 percent. “That, to me, is a red flag,” Director of U.S. Operations Michael Zwirn acknowledged to me. Nevertheless, he said “it is well documented that it’s the most lucrative community-based ecotourism project in Cambodia. That doesn’t mean that everyone is making money, or that they’re making enough money, but the community is clearly benefiting.”
Harold de Martimprey, Wildlife Alliance’s community-based ecotourism project manager, told me in an email interview:We monitor closely the impact of the CBET project on the diminution of poaching and deforestation. We estimate that since the beginning of the project, the illegal activities have decreased by almost 70 percent.
As Chi Phat ecotourism continues to scale up, de Martimprey expressed hope that more and more villagers would participate in the project and stop destructive livelihoods.
After four years, Chi Phat has already developed enough to operate financially on its own. Wildlife Alliance will stop funding the project later this year and transition it towards total self-sustainability. The plan is to then ramp up efforts at a neighboring project in Trapeang Ruong, due to open to the public next month.
A Land of Opportunity
So far Chi Phat lacks much of what do-gooder tourists are hoping to find when they come in search of ecotourism. There is little to no information about the work of Wildlife Alliance and how ecotourism benefits the town, or the health, education, and economic benefits the villagers have received. A little more obvious justification for ecotourism’s inflated prices might appease the average backpacker used to exploitatively lower prices elsewhere in the country. The guides, staff, and host families for the most part speak little English, which does not bode well for its tourism potential. “This is a work in progress,” said de Martimprey.
Most of my time in Chi Phat, I felt like the only foreigner to ever set foot in the town – refreshing after witnessing much of the rest of Southeast Asia’s crowded backpacker scene. As Chi Phat continues to grow, hopefully it will “bring in enough people to support the community without the adverse effects of tourism,” said Zwirn. “They don’t want it to turn into the Galapagos.” Thankfully, de Martimprey told me, “Chi Phat is far from reaching this limit and can be scaled up to much bigger operation,” without negatively impacting the environment.
Luckily, plans to build a highly destructive titanium mine near the town were recently nixed by Prime Minister Hun Sen in what was an unexpected victory over industrial interests. However, soon after, the town was again under threat – this time by a proposed banana plantation nearby.
“The Cardamom Mountains are still seen as a land of opportunity for economic land concessions for some not-so-green investors looking at buying land for different purposes, and often disregarding the interest of the local people,” said de Martimprey.
Eventually Zwirn hopes that as more tourists come to the Cardamoms, they will become “a constituency for conservation,” he said. “We need to build a worldwide awareness of the Cardamoms as a destination, and as a place worth saving.”
Sources: BBC, IFAD, Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, United Nations, Wall Street Journal, Wildlife Alliance, World Bank, World Wildlife Fund.
Photo Credit: Hannah Marqusee. -
Enhancing Public Engagement in Climate Change: The 2011 Climate Change Communicators of the Year
›“Excellence in climate communication has to do with public engagement – communication that expands the portion of the public that is engaged in this issue and enhances their degree of engagement,” said Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. “Enhancing Public Engagement in Climate Change: The 2011 Climate Change Communicators of the Year,” was held jointly by the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) and George Mason University on June 8 to present awards for excellence in climate change communication by Naomi Oreskes and the Alliance for Climate Education.
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Watch: Janani Vivekananda on Climate Change and Stability in Fragile States
›At International Alert, the starting point for thinking about how climate change affects stability is recognizing that climate change will interact with and amplify existing social, economic, and political stressors in fragile communities, said Janani Vivekananda in this interview with the ECSP.
“Rather than climate change being this single, direct causal factor which will spark conflict at the national level,” Vivekananda said, these stressors “will shift the tipping point at which conflict might ignite.” In places that are already weakened by instability and conflict, climate change will simply be an additional challenge.
To address this additional challenge, Vivekananda said two things must be understood about the effects of climate change on fragile states: 1) Environmental, social, economic, and political stressors will be most evident at the household and community level; and 2) Those stressors are interrelated.
“You can’t address one of these things in isolation from the others. You have to understand how they all interact together to be able to respond appropriately,” she said. “We can’t think about food security, for example, without thinking about land degradation.” In addition, responses need to be relevant to their context, and that context “can only be understood through very sub-national, context-specific evidence.” Vivekanada explained that this kind of evidence can only come from a “bottom-up” approach, which should be coordinated as part of a broader effort.
For more on the connections between climate change and stability, see The New Security Beat’s summary of “Connections Between Climate and Stability: Lessons From Asia and Africa,” with Janani Vivekanada, Jeffrey Stark of the Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability, and Cynthia Brady of USAID speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Center on May 10. -
Health Development: Providing Free Care and Overcoming Gender-Based Violence
›In The Lancet’s “How Did Sierra Leone Provide Free Health Care?,” author John Donnelly of the Ministerial Leadership Initiative attributes the unanticipated success of a free health care program for women and children in Sierra Leone to good organization, transparency, and a high degree of cooperation between the government, donors, and development partners. One distinctive factor that has contributed to the health system’s turnaround is the unusually high level of political will on the part of President Ernest Bai Koroma, writes Donnelly. Similar to Egypt’s health and population initiatives, Sierra Leone’s marked commitment, accountability, and investment as a host country has contributed highly to the success of its program and triggered further investment from donors.In “Systematic Violence: A Barrier to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals for Women,” from the Journal of Women’s Health, authors Joia S. Mukherjee, Donna J. Barry, Hind Satti, Maxi Raymonville, Sarah Marsh, and Mary Kay Smith-Fawzi assert that the elevation of women is integral to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, to which structural violence serves as a significant barrier. Murkherjee et al. recommend community-based programs to combat structural violence and prevent disease, such as the Partners in Health (PIH) program in Haiti. PIH trains community health workers, expands health care as a public good, and bolsters social determinants, which include increasing access to family planning and education, providing compensation for medical workers, and improving health infrastructure. -
Environmental Action Plans in Darfur: Improving Resilience, Reducing Vulnerability
›Many villagers in Baaba, a community of 600 in South Darfur, remember a shady forest of mango and guava trees that provided food and a valuable income for the villagers and a pleasant picnic spot for people in Nyala, the nearby state capital. Over the last decade, that forest has degraded into eroded brush dotted by the occasional baobab – a transformation that is unfortunately a familiar sight throughout Darfur.
Most of Baaba’s trees have become firewood and charcoal for the people living in nearby internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Baaba’s residents, who themselves returned from the camps to try to rebuild their lives at home, struggle to coax enough food from the soil, which has largely eroded away following deforestation. Afraid to venture any further than necessary from home for fear of violence and banditry in the countryside, they farm and graze the same land year after year without fallow periods – further depleting the soil and driving yields ever lower.
Baaba is like hundreds of Darfuri villages, which face a brutal mix of insecurity and environmental decline that leaves them one poor harvest away from being forced into the IDP camps. Baaba, however, is also a pilot participant in a new approach – the Community Environmental Action Plan – that aims to rehabilitate the local environment, enable people to sustainably manage natural resources, and ultimately to make communities more prosperous and resilient.
Most of Darfur has always been marginal land where farming and herding provide a meager livelihood and natural resources are few. Even before war broke out in 2003, soaring population growth (total population has quintupled since the 1970s) was putting intolerable pressure on the land, water, and trees of Darfur. The conflict in Darfur has since heavily disrupted traditional methods for sharing and maintaining natural resources, leading to environmental devastation. The worsening effects of climate change – though hard to separate from local environmental depletion – are also beginning to disrupt weather patterns and farming. The disheartening result is that even where fighting has subsided and displaced persons return home, they often find that the land no longer sustains them.
Traditional humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects are ill-suited to help, since persistent insecurity deprives humanitarian actors of access to communities for weeks or months at a time. Environmental decline didn’t start the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, but it threatens to prolong it and put a sustainable peace out of reach.
Community Environmental Action PlansThe International Organization for Migration (IOM), mandated to work on IDP and return issues in Darfur, aimed to address these challenges with Community Environmental Action Plans (CEAPs) in three pilot villages. CEAPs build comprehensive local capacity, enabling communities to manage natural resources sustainably and address environmental problems themselves without relying on outside support. The ultimate goal is to build the resilience and adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities. IOM worked with Baaba and two other villages to implement CEAPs, in partnership with the Swiss-based environmental NGO ProAct, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the government of South Darfur, and Darfuri environmental organizations. The project, funded by the Government of Japan, ran from early 2009 until mid-2010.
The CEAP process trains communities to understand the connections between a healthy ecosystem and a prosperous community and to promote livelihoods by rehabilitating the environment. Each participating village formed a CEAP governance committee, which was then trained to understand the environment as a single integrated system and to see how damaging one resource like trees can devastate other ecosystem services – such as pollination, groundwater retention, and soil fertility – that enable and promote human livelihoods. The communities then identified essential needs, including reforestation, water harvesting, and improved sanitation, and worked with IOM to develop appropriate responses. These activities were all implemented by the villages themselves, with technical and material support from IOM and its partners.
Building Local Capacity
The communities built low-tech but highly productive tree nurseries, producing and planting over 200,000 seedlings to restore damaged land and provide a sustainable wood supply. Local women learned how to make highly fuel-efficient stoves using locally available materials, cutting their need for firewood and allowing them to sell stoves in the nearby Nyala market.Farmers received extensive training in sustainable agriculture techniques, including water harvesting, composting, agro-forestry, and intercropping (mixing complementary plant species together in the same fields). Volunteers were trained in effective hygiene practices and built latrines for each household. Water committees were trained to repair and maintain the villages’ indispensable but fragile water hand pumps, ensuring a more reliable source of drinking water. Each of these activities was governed by a community committee, including women and youth, trained to manage the projects for the benefit of the entire community and continue the work after the project’s end.
Through this approach, all three villages significantly boosted their livelihoods and agricultural productivity while becoming less dependent on the unsustainable exploitation of their fragile environment. The CEAP approach benefits greatly from focusing on capacity-building and local implementation, which fosters a strong sense of community ownership that persists after the project ends. Equally important, CEAPs attempt to address most or all of a community’s environmental issues simultaneously, reducing the risk that neglected environmental problems – particularly agricultural failure – will critically destabilize and displace a community in the future.
A Replicable Model
CEAPs aren’t a panacea, particularly in the conflict-prone areas where they are most needed. Insecurity, particularly a series of abductions of humanitarian workers from several organizations in 2010, cut off IOM’s access to the communities late in the project. Though the core activities were completed by working through local partners with more reliable access, the security situation left few opportunities for follow-up activities. Longer-term threats, particularly unrestrained population growth – which requires a comprehensive approach that includes addressing unmet need for family planning services – could undo much of the good that CEAPs accomplish.
Though insecurity prevented IOM from continuing the project, other organizations including UNEP are implementing and refining the CEAP approach elsewhere in Darfur and other regions in sub-Saharan Africa. As climate changes intensifies and the potential for related conflicts looms, the CEAP approach should be considered as a powerful and flexible tool to rehabilitate the environment and strengthen vulnerable communities.
Paul Rushton is a consultant for the International Organization for Migration, Sudan, and worked as a Programme Officer managing the CEAP projects in South Darfur from 2009 to 2010.
Sources: International Organization for Migration, UN.
Photo Credit: Camels graze in a destroyed and degraded village in Western Darfur, courtesy of UNEP; and pictures from CEAP sites in Southern Darfur, courtesy of Paul Rushton. -
Connections Between Climate and Stability: Lessons From Asia and Africa
›“We, alongside this growing consensus of research institutes, analysts, and security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, think of climate change as a risk multiplier; as something that will amplify existing social, political, and resource stressors,” said Janani Vivekananda of International Alert, speaking at the Wilson Center on May 10. [Video Below]
Vivekananda, a senior climate policy officer with International Alert’s Peacebuilding Program, was joined by co-presenter Jeffrey Stark, the director of research and studies at the Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability (FESS), and discussant Cynthia Brady, senior conflict advisor with USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, to discuss the complex connections between climate change, conflict, stability, and governance.
A Multi-Layered Problem
Climate change and stability represent a “double-headed problem,” said Vivekananda. Climate change, while never the only cause of conflict, can increase its risk in certain contexts. At the same time, “states which are affected by conflict will already have weakened social, economic, and political resilience, which will mean that these states and their governments will find it difficult to address the impacts of climate change on the lives of these communities,” she said.
“In fragile states, the particular challenge is adapting the way we respond to climate change, bearing in mind the specific challenges of operating in a fragile context,” said Vivekananda. Ill-informed intervention programs run the risk of doing more harm than good, she said.
For example, Vivekananda said an agrarian village she visited in Nepal was suffering from an acute water shortage and tried adapting by switching from rice to corn, which is a less water-intensive crop. However, this initiative failed because the villagers lacked the necessary technical knowledge and coordination to make their efforts successful in the long term, and in the short term this effort actually further reduced water supplies and exacerbated deforestation.
“Local responses will only be able to go so far without national-level coordination,” Vivekananda said. What is needed is a “harmony” between so-called “top-down” and “bottom-up” initiatives. “Adapting to these challenges means adapting development assistance,” she said.
“What we’re finding is that the qualities that help a community, or a society, or in fact a government be resilient to climate change are in fact very similar qualities to that which makes a community able to deal with conflict issues without resorting to violence,” said Vivekananda.
No Simple, Surgical Solutions
“The impacts of environmental change and management of natural resources are always embedded in a powerful web of social, economic, political, cultural, and historical factors,” said Stark. “We shouldn’t expect simple, surgical solutions to climate change challenges,” he said.
Uganda and Ethiopia, for example, both have rich pastoralist traditions that are threatened by climate change. Increasing temperatures, drought, infrequent but intense rains, hail, and changes in seasonal patterns are threatening pasture lands and livelihoods.
At the same time, pastoralists are confronting the effects of a rapidly growing population, expanding cultivation, forced migration, shrinking traditional grazing lands, anti-pastoralist attitudes, and ethnic tensions. As a result, “any intervention in relation to climate adaptation – whether for water, or food, or alternative livelihoods – has to be fully understood and explicitly acknowledged as mutually beneficial by all sides,” Stark said. “If it is seen in any way to be favoring one group or another it will just cause conflict, so it is a very difficult and delicate situation.”
Yet, the challenges of climate change, said Stark, can be used “as a way to involve people who feel marginalized, empower their participation…and at the same time address some of the drivers of conflict that exist in the country.”
Case Studies: Addressing the “Missing Middle”
When doing climate change work in fragile states, “you have to think about your do-no-harm parameters,” said Brady. “Where are the opportunities to get additional sustainable development benefit and additional stabilization benefit out of reducing climate change vulnerability?”
More in-depth case studies, such as the work funded by USAID and conducted by FESS in Uganda and Ethiopia, are needed to help fill the “missing middle” between broad, international climate change efforts – like those at the United Nations – and the community level, Brady said.
The information generated from these case studies is being eagerly awaited by USAID’s partners in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, said Brady. “We are all hopeful that there will be some really significant common lessons learned, and that at a minimum, we may draw some common understanding about what climate-sensitive parameters in fragile states might mean.”
Image Credit: “Ethio Somali 1,” courtesy of flickr user aheavens.
