Getting the Targets and Indicators Right

One of the most important innovations of the MDG approach is its ability to make governments more accountable for their performance in improving human well-being. By stating goals and measuring progress in clear, straightforward language, the MDGs make it easy for civil-society groups to evaluate progress toward human development goals and to issue a public “report card” on a government’s success or failure. Unfortunately, the lack of clear, comprehensive targets and indicators for measuring the capacity of ecosystems to provide sustainable environmental income for the poor means that the “accountability effect” of the MDG approach is not yet applicable to the world’s environmental goals. Until the environmental framework of the MDGs is fixed, short-run progress towards the other goals is at risk of being unsustainable.

Realigning the MDG framework to correct its environmental shortcomings begins with an acceptance of ecosystems as the key to environmental income, the most direct way that nature affects the poor. This realignment should be guided by the recent findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year study conducted by more than 1,300 scientists from 95 countries to ascertain the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being (MA 2005a). The scientists determined that in all regions, and particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the condition and management of ecosystems is a “dominant factor” affecting the chances of success in fighting poverty. They concluded that the degradation of ecosystems is already a “significant barrier” to achieving the MDGs. In fact, many of the regions facing the biggest hurdles in reaching the MDGs coincide with those experiencing significant ecosystem degradation (MA 2005a:18).

Reconceptualizing Target 9

Reframing MDG-7 requires that the wording of Target 9—not to mention its conceptual underpinnings—should make clear the importance of ecosystems to the poor, and be grounded in an appreciation of the central role of healthy, well-functioning ecosystems in ensuring sustainability.

The current wording of Target 9 has two quite distinct pieces:

Target 9: (1) “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and (2) reverse the loss of environmental resources.”

Both pieces need to be treated separately and reworded. In addition, another component needs to be added to Target 9 to capture the importance of natural resource access to the poor. (See Table 4 for a summary of suggested changes in the wording and indicators of Target 9, as discussed below.)

1. Focus on ecosystem capacity
Let’s first deal with the second half of Target 9: “reverse the loss of environmental resources.” Conceptually, this is the most important section of the target. To refocus this section of the target on ecosystems—the primary “environmental resources” used by the poor—the current wording should be replaced with the following: “maintain or restore the capacity of ecosystems to provide critical ecosystem services.”

As the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment demonstrates, humans have changed ecosystems extensively over the past 50 years. Most ecosystem services are being used unsustainably, and the capacity of ecosystems to deliver these services is being persistently eroded. This growing pressure on ecosystems risks sudden, potentially irreversible changes, such as the collapse of fisheries or the creation of “dead zones” in coastal waters. Also, because the costs of the damage are borne disproportionately by the poor, ecosystem degradation contributes to inequities across social and ethnic groups and is sometimes the principal factor behind poverty and social conflict (MA 2005a:17).

Environmental sustainability, then, is defined by maintaining the ability of ecosystems to deliver the ecosystem services that rich and poor depend on. Some degree of tradeoff between different kinds of ecosystem services is inevitable as human populations expand and as poor people around the world aspire to higher standards of living. However, the key is to ensure that these tradeoffs are managed in ways that preserve the overall integrity of ecosystems and their capacity to provide the full range of services valued by humans.

2. Reconceptualize Target 9 indicators
Idicators for a realigned MDG Target 9 should be focused around those aspects of ecosystem function and integrity that bear most directly on the livelihoods of the poor. For example, the rural poor in developing countries rely on common pool resources to generate significant amounts of environmental income as an important component of their livelihoods. At least some of the indicators for MDG Target 9 should capture this. Potential indicators that would reflect the state of common pool resources and the associated income opportunities they afford include:

• extent and condition of communal fisheries (coastal and inland);
• extent and condition of forested areas held in common;
• watershed conditions on communally held lands (e.g., vegetative cover and water availability, including groundwater trends).

Cambodia provides an example of good practice here. Officials were thinking along these lines when they created their own MDG-7 targets and indicators, which track communally held resources of direct importance to the rural poor (UNDP 2005c:6). Their indicators include:

• the proportion of fishing lots released to local communities (targeted to reach 60 percent by 2015, up from 56 percent in 1998), and
• the number of community-based fisheries (targeted to reach 589 in 2015, up from 264 in 2000).

In addition to tracking common pool resources, Target 9 indicators should acknowledge the reliance poor households place on small-scale farming. Relevant indicators would include:

• soil fertility (such as nutrient availability or percentage of organic matter in top soil;
• land degradation (such as salinization; waterlogging; soil loss).

3. Include all institutions; add targets and time-tables
As currently worded, the first half of Target 9 states: “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs.” This component of Target 9 should be widened to explicitly encompass key institutions at other levels of governance, including local, provincial, and international agencies. In other words, this section of Target 9 should be worded: “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into local, national, and international policies and programs.” MDG-7 commits institutions at all levels of governance to make environmental sustainability a reality on the ground, and the wording of Target 9 should clearly reflect this. All such institutions, and not just national-level ones, should be accountable for their performance in this respect, and should report regularly on their progress.

In addition, the general intent of this target needs to be translated into specific, time-framed actions that can be monitored from year to year. Revamping Target 9 to make this element verifiable and time-bound is crucial to the ability of civil society to hold government accountable and exert pressure for improved performance.

4. Add a target that ensures resource access
Target 9, as currently worded, does not capture the importance of access—both physical access to resources as well as access to information and participation in environmental decisionmaking— to the livelihoods of the poor. The importance of access, manifest in secure tenure and community-level institutions that are poor-friendly, is one of the principal conclusions of Chapter 3. When we say that the MDGs should better reflect the importance of environmental governance to the poor, this is the governance we mean. The “sustainability” that MDG-7 is meant to ensure is only meaningful if the poor share "environmental access”—the combination of physical access and environmental empowerment. This kind of environmental access is the basis of equity in the use of ecosystems—certainly one of the components of sustainability.

Target 9 cannot really accommodate these concepts; they should be captured in a separate Governance Target that could read: “Ensure the poor access to environmental resources and decision-making.” Such a target would be directed at institutions of governance at all levels: national, sub-national, and international.

Indicators for this target should revolve around:

• tenure (proportion of rural households with secure tenure to the resources on which their livelihoods are based),
• access to environmental information (proportion of rural households with access to official information, such as extension services on ecosystem-based agricultural management), and
• participation in local environmental decisions (indicators of pro-poor decentralization of decision-making on environmental management).

Monitoring and developing indicators of environmental governance is still a relatively new field, and such indicators might have to be adjusted for each nation. However, Cambodia again offers an example of best practice. Officials have set targets and indicators encompassing rural tenure, including an overall target of increasing the proportion of the population in both urban and rural areas with access to land security, as well as increasing the percentage of land parcels having titles in both urban and rural areas from 15 percent in 2000 to 65 percent in 2015 (UNDP 2005c:6).