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

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Environmental Data in the Developing World
differing expectations from the west

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

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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

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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 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.

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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 areinternational 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
  Ill 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 persons 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! Dont make
  assumptions about what the indicator means if you
  dont know exactly how it was calculated.

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