Environmental Data in the Developing World: differing expectations from the west

Dr. Joy E. Hecht Consultant on Environmental Economics and Policy

Objectives

• Identify key issues that arise in third world data development that differ from the west.

• Consider patterns that emerge in developing country data availability, which should be taken into account in considering the development of indicators.

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What kinds of data do we want?

• Spatial information about natural resources and land – includes a wide range of data • Ambient environmental quality – pollutant levels in air, water, and soil • Pollutant discharges – into air, water, and soil, by source or economic activity • Data about human activities that rely on or affect the environment 3

About basic data needs

• All of these data are combined both to develop meaningful indicators and to analyze environmental and economic policy issues.

• Often there is poor understanding of: – Distinction between emissions and ambient data – Why economic and social data are essential for environmental management – Importance of linking environmental data to economic classifications such as ISIC.

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Indicators vs. Data for Policy Analysis

• Indicators are useful as a flag, to alert attention to problems or give a quick overview of trends.

• Policy analysis requires more detailed data. • If the detailed data exist, they can be used for either purpose, but indicators cannot be used for policy analysis.

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Problems in collection of primary data

• Domestic funds often are not available for consistent collection of time series data.

• Donor resources play a key role; however donors typically will not fund ongoing activities, preferring one-time efforts.

• Data essential for economic management are more likely to be collected by government, e.g. water and tourism in Egypt, forests in the Philippines.

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Available internationally comparable data

• Some internationally-comparable data can be derived from “top-down” sources; GHG emissions from fuel combustion (from ORNL), small scale LU/LC (from satellite images), etc.

• Existence of such data does not indicate that the countries have underlying detail.

• Small-scale global databases cannot be disaggregated to learn more about the countries.

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Influence of Donor Funding

• Donor preferences for “cutting edge” efforts or “leveraging their resources” mean they will not support operational data collection.

• In poor countries, therefore, data such as forest inventories, access to satellite imagery, even censuses of population, are intermittent rather than regular, based on donor interest.

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A few politically-driven exceptions

• WMO support for collection of weather data in the Sahel and elsewhere • USAID and EU support for collection of food security data in sub-Saharan Africa • Both were driven by food crises that caused political crises in the west, hence ongoing foreign funding for them.

• Similarly western countries have good data on energy, because of the oil crises of the 1970s; these are now used to estimate GHG emissions.

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International standards have influence

• International norms such as SNA, SDDS, measures calculated by World Bank or IMF, do lead to standard core data.

• UN Statistical Commission adoption of environmental accounts and WTO adoption of tourism accounts has created some interest in developing them.

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Environmental Accounting in particular

• Environmental accounts help policy analysis by linking economic and environmental data.

• They permit calculation of simple indicators.

• Many countries prefer to focus first on simply improving environmental statistics.

• Certain key elements underlying the accounts – e.g. organizing emissions and resource use data by ISIC – may have greater payoff than building full accounts.

• Few countries are interested in “green GDP.” Adjusted net savings may be more useful.

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International norms for environmental indicators

• International indicator systems such as Mediterranean Blue Plan or UNEP sustainability indicators are often not appropriate for individual countries for ecological reasons.

• If no funding is available for data collection, and funding does not depend on these indicators, countries will not invest in developing them.

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How useful are international norms?

Should countries invest in developing indicators to meet international needs?

• Such indicators are interesting for people like us, or to assess countries from outside.

• If they are not also useful internally within the country, then they may be an imposition not justified by national needs.

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Data Access is a MAJOR Problem

• No FOIA outside the US!

• Data are the turf of the agency collecting them and will not be shared freely.

• Sometimes data are bartered for among agencies – I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

• Metadata do not exist, so even finding out what data are out there is difficult. • Improving metadata might make it easier to improve data access as well.

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Donor role in data sharing

• Sometimes donors supporting data collection put them on the web.

• More often donors interested in free-market approaches want countries to sell the data to cover costs of collecting them.

• This is neither realistic nor desirable. • The total cost of data collection is large; the marginal cost of supplying it to another user is virtually zero. It should be priced at its marginal cost.

• One person’s use does not reduce what is available to others; the more use, the better off the society will be.

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Recommendations for an indicator

• Keep it simple – do not add to countries’ workloads by asking for additional work to create this indicator.

• Time series measures will be more useful in assessing country progress than measures for a single time period.

• If the indicator comes from international work, do not assume that it will be useful to the countries as well.

• The devil is in the details! Don’t make assumptions about what the indicator means if you don’t know exactly how it was calculated.

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