Sustainable Development in Practice: A Handbook for Integrating Environment, Climate and Poverty Reduction.
Poverty-Environment Action for Sustainable
Development Goals, a joint project of the United Nations Development Programme
and the United Nations Environment Programme, has since 2018 brought poverty,
environment and climate objectives into the heart of government and private
sector decision-making in eight least developed countries: Bangladesh, Lao
Peoples‘ Democratic Republic, Malawi, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar,
Nepal, and Rwanda. It has contributed to further integrating
poverty-environment, climate and gender objectives in three additional
countries: Indonesia, South Africa and Tanzania—so as to strengthen the
sustainable management of natural resources and to alleviate poverty. There are three stories from the four country impact studies: Malawi, Rwanda and Indonesia.
Building on the legacy of its predecessor, the
Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI), which operated in over 30 countries from
2005 to 2018, Poverty-Environment Action has helped the integration and
implementation of pro-poor environmental sustainability objectives into
national, subnational and sectoral development policies, plans, budgets and
investment to contribute to poverty alleviation and an inclusive, green
economy.
Reaching those most at danger of being left
behind by traditional approaches to national development requires addressing
inequalities, related notably to gender, which hinder development and entrench
poverty. PEI and Poverrty-Environment Action addressed the multidimensional
nature of poverty—not only income poverty, but also environmental deprivations
such as lack of natural capital and environmental hazards such as climate
change and pollution.
Eradicating multidimensional poverty is the
indispensable requirement for sustainable development. Economic growth alone is
not enough. It also requires improving management of the environment and
natural resources—the “natural wealth” of the poor, who overwhelmingly depend
on natural resources for their livelihoods.
Sustainable Development in Practice: A Handbook for Integrating Environment, Climate and Poverty Reduction provides guidance and concrete examples of how to do this, drawn from Poverty-Environment
Action experience in Africa and Asia-Pacific, as well as from its predecessor
PEI and other initiatives.
This handbook is an updated edition of the PEI
flagship handbook Mainstreaming Environment and Climate for Poverty
Reduction and Sustainable Development, published in 2015. In the ensuing
years, global instability has increased under the pressures of the triple
planetary crises of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss—further
exacerbated by the global coronavirus pandemic and civil and international
conflicts whose origins may be traced to the systemic failure to address the
planetary crises.
This new version of the handbook reflects
lessons learned and updates on the Poverty-Environment Action integrated,
programmatic approach to poverty-environment mainstreaming. It also draws on
experiences from other endeavours aimed at mainstreaming climate change issues
and incorporating an inclusive green economy.
This handbook is designed as guidance for
policymakers and practitioners to integrate environment, climate and poverty
objectives into key development decision processes: participation, planning,
budgeting, financing and monitoring. These are the processes that can shape
sustainable development.
Chapter 1: The Integrated Approach to Poverty,
Climate and Environment provides a practical organizing framework for
integration—organized around the typical decision-making cycle of planning,
budgeting, investing, executing, monitoring, review and dialogue.
Chapter 2: Analysing Poverty-Environment
Issues details PEI/Poverrty-Environment Action contributions to analysis,
including the development of multidimensional poverty analysis linked to the
environment and natural resources, environmental and natural resource economic
analysis at the national level, and institutional analysis, along with other
methodologies, notably in political economy analysis.
The handbook takes a deep dive in Chapter 3
into Dialogue and Engagement, detailing how a formal dialogue process is
particularly helpful to bridge the analysis discussed in Chapter 2 with the
planning covered in Chapter 4. This chapter focuses on engaging stakeholders in
contributing to the big picture of poverty-environment policymaking at the
level of vision and principles. It explains the range of dialogue functions,
levels and types that bring different actors together into a safe space to
exchange and generate knowledge and options; and explores ways to plan
dialogues, tactics to engage specific stakeholder groups and methodologies that
work for running dialogue sessions to facilitate collective action.
Chapter 4: Integrating Poverty-Environment
Objectives into Plans offers guidance on integrating poverty-environment
objectives into national, subnational, sectoral and thematic plans, focusing on
the mainstream planning processes that are typically in place in a developing
country.
Chapter 5: Finance for Poverty-Environment
Objectives sets out guidance on integrating poverty-environment objectives into
national budgets and public and private investment. It addresses an audience of
environment and development professionals, helping them to understand budget
and financial processes and a range of tools to achieve poverty-environment
objectives.
Chapter 6: Communications on Poverty, Climate
and Environment shows how to raise the profile of poverty-environment
integration and catalyse engagement, share information, and influence policy
outcomes.
Chapter 7: Monitoring and Evaluation of
Poverty-Environment Integration delineates monitoring to track
poverty-environment integration across the policy cycle and a robust set of
relevant indicators.
Chapter 8: Building Integrated, Transformative
Institutions rounds out the discussion by addressing the need for institutions
to be much more integrated and transformative if collective poverty-environment
goals are to be achieved at scale.
The handbook thus provides a model for action and a set of widely valid and credible approaches— particularly for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
There is an interview with Linxiu Zhand the UNEP-IEMP director for those that want to learn more here.
--
— Michael
Stanley-Jones
Senior Advisor, Circular Research Foundation
Parabita, Italy
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