Yosabeth Zewde Weldemedhin

My contributions

• Posted on 03 Apr 2024

  How are development projects affecting the environment and how do we evaluate this impact?

  Discussion

  • 

    Yosabeth Zewde Weldemedhin

    Results measurement and evaluations

    United Republic of Tanzania

    Dear colleagues,

    thank you for engaging in this discussion and for your useful feedback.

    Thanks Adeleke for sharing how your CSA project measured environmental impacts – I have previously come across ‘hectares of land under improved CSA practices’ as a potential indicator and I see you measure not only sustainable land management but also ‘reduction of agricultural land
    expansion at the expense of forest lands’ which is useful to know. It will be interesting to see the future impact of some of the outputs related to sensitizing the community on climate risk issues and introducing RR actions and strategies.

    Thanks Steven for drawing our attention to your new eval framework which attempts to ‘mainstream’ climate into the evaluation cycle - I was not aware of this and it does indeed seem to be a useful tool in assessing the weight given to climate considerations during evaluation and what lessons
    can be gleaned from this and applied to project design.

    Thanks Lal, your discussion on the 3 groups of indicators of adverse environmental consequences. In the past, the indicators I have come across mostly focus on the physical environment and largely ignore those related to fauna and flora. Hence, your framework is very useful as it takes into
    account the nuances and interdependencies between the environment and the flora and fauna in a specific area. Thank you also for the sobering reminder that a magical list of widely applicable indicators does not exist and instead, these indicators should be developed based on contextual
    information and field data.

    Thanks Silva your illustration is spot on – indeed, I find my risks and assumptions sections are too concerned with the project results and what hinders’ their achievements rather than how the project results are affecting the environment. This requires a new change in mindset – thank
    you for the reminder.

    Asante Daniel, to your first point, I have found that environmental and social safeguards are sometimes used at the project design phase to ensure the project meets a certain threshold (to avoid, minimize, mitigate adverse impacts) to qualify for approval. However this process is at times
    completely disconnected from the evaluation process, however these two phases should be connected in a feedback loop. You make a lot of observations about the interaction between those doing the measuring and the communities in which this process is taking place – I will continue to
    ponder these!

    And my thanks also to you Hadera for providing such an indepth description of project level output indicators that can logically point to outcome and impact level indicators on mitigation and adaptation - I will keep these in my indicator reservoir. It will be interesting to see whether in the
    future, these type of CSA projects will be designed (and evaluated) in a way that allows us to make concrete estimations of impact level indicators such as reduced emissions based on project level data.

    Best regards,

    Yosi

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