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Category: Global

Reducing Environmental Risks from Belt and Road Initiative Investments in Transportation Infrastructure

Elizabeth Losos, Alexander Pfaff, Lydia Olander, Sara Mason, Seth Morgan
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8718

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The Belt and Road Initiative, due to its diverse and extensive infrastructure investments, poses a wide range of environmental risks. Some projects have easily identifiable and measurable impacts, such as energy projects’ greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as transportation infrastructure, due to their vast geographic reach, generate more complex and potentially more extensive environmental risks. The proposed Belt and Road Initiative rail and road investments have stimulated concerns because of the history of significant negative environmental impacts from large-scaletransportation projects across the globe. This paper studies environmental risks—direct and indirect—from Belt and Road Initiative transportation projects and the mitigation strategies and policies to address them. The paper concludes with a recommendation on how to take advantage of the scale of the Belt and Road Initiative to address these concerns in a way not typically available to stand-alone projects. In short, this scale motivates and permits early integrated development and conservation planning.

21 Comments

When and Why Supply-Chain Sustainability Initiatives “Work”: linking initiatives’ effectiveness to their characteristics and contexts

Rachael Garrett, Alexander Pfaff, Kristin Komives, Jeff Milder, Ximena Rueda
Meridian Institute Report

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We aim to offer guideposts for forming expectations about when SSIs are “effective” (defined below). We suggest some factors that affect SSIs’ effects on both narrow and broader goals. With improved understanding of how those factors affect behaviors and outcomes, actors developing and improving SSIs can better predict which efforts will improve sustainability and can better organize empirical SSI studies.

24 Comments

Evaluating the impacts of protected areas on human well-being across the developing world

Robin Naidoo, Drew Gerkey, David Hole, Alexander Pfaff, Alicia Ellis, Chris Golden, Diego Herrera, Kiersten Johnson, Mark Mulligan, Taylor Ricketts, Brendan Fisher
Science Advances 5:eaav3006

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Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental for biodiversity conservation, yet their impacts on nearby residents are contested. We synthesized environmental and socioeconomic conditions of >87,000 children in >60,000 households situated either near or far from >600 PAs within 34 developing countries. We used quasi-experimental hierarchical regression to isolate the impact of living near a PA on several aspects of human well-being. Households near PAs with tourism also had higher wealth levels (by 17%) and a lower likelihood of poverty (by 16%) than similar households living far from PAs. Children under 5 years old living nearmultiple-use PAs with tourism also had higher height-for-age scores (by 10%) and were less likely to be stunted (by 13%) than similar children living far from PAs. For the largest and most comprehensive socioeconomic-environmental dataset yet assembled, we found no evidence of negative PA impacts and consistent statistical evidence to suggest PAs can positively affect human well-being.

16 Comments

Nature can deliver on the SDGs

Brendan Fisher, Diego Herrera, Diane Adams, Helen E. Fox, Louise Gallagher, Drew Gerkey, David Gill, Christopher D. Golden, David Hole, Kiersten Johnson, Mark Mulligan, Samuel S. Myers, Robin Naidoo, Alexander Pfaff, Ranaivo Rasolofoson, Elizabeth Selig, David Tickner, Timothy Treuer, Taylor Ricketts
Lancet Planetary Health

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The increasing availability of data and improved analytic techniques now enable us to better understand when and where investing in nature can deliver net benefits for people − especially with respect to the most vulnerable populations in developing countries. These advances open the door for efficient interventions that can advance multiple SDGs at once. Recently, we harmonized a suite of global datasets to explore the critical nexus of forests, poverty and human health – an overlap of SDGs 1, 2, 3, 6 and 15. Our approach combined demographic and health surveys for 297,112 children in 35 developing countries with data describing the local environmental conditions for each child4 (Fig. 1a; see online materials for details). This allowed us to estimate the effect forests may play in supporting human health, while controlling for the influence of important socio-economic differences. We extended this work to look at how forests affect three childhood health concerns of global significance – stunting, anemia, and diarrheal disease.

22 Comments

Conservation Impacts of Voluntary Sustainability Standards: how has our understanding changed

K.Komives, A.Arton, E.Baker, C.Longo, D.Newsom, A.Pfaff, C.Romero
Meridian Institute (merid.org/content/projects/)

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In 2012, a committee of international experts from academia, business, and civil society published Toward Sustainability: The Roles and Limitations of Certification. In addition to describing the history, key features and actors in voluntary standard systems (VSS), the report summarized the state of knowledge regarding VSS use and their potential to achieve conservation and other goals. It also enumerated existing evidence about VSS impacts, finding few studies and weak study designs. Since then, considerable effort has been made to fill research gaps. In this report, we review new VSS studies in the agricultural, forestry, marine fisheries and aquaculture sectors to revisit the issue of the state of knowledge about their conservation impacts and, going forward, consider how best to advance VSS impacts research.

 

25 Comments

Upstream watershed condition predicts rural children’s health across 35 developing countries

Diego Herrera, Alicia Ellis, Brendan Fisher, Christopher D. Golden, Kiersten Johnson, Mark Mulligan, Alexander Pfaff, Timothy Treuer, Taylor H. Ricketts
Nature Communications 8:811 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00775-2

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Diarrheal disease (DD) due to contaminated water is a major cause of child mortality globally. Forests and wetlands can provide ecosystem services that help maintain water quality. To understand the connections between land cover and childhood DD, we compiled a database of 293,362 children in 35 countries with information on health, socioeconomic factors, climate, and watershed condition. Using hierarchical models, here we find that higher upstream tree cover is associated with lower probability of DD downstream. This effect is significant for rural households but not for urban households, suggesting differing dependence on watershed conditions. In rural areas, the effect of a 30% increase in upstream tree cover is similar to the effect of improved sanitation, but smaller than the effect of improved water source, wealth or education. We conclude that maintaining natural capital within watersheds can be an important public health investment, especially for populations with low levels of built capital.

 

23 Comments