Environmental Data in the Developing World:

differing expectations from the west

Dr. Joy E. HechtConsultant on Environmental

Economics and Policy

2

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.

3

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

4

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

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.

8

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.

9

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.

10

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.

11

Environmental Accountingin 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.

12

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.

13

How useful areinternational norms?

Should countries invest in developingindicators 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.

14

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.

15

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.

16

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.

17