2.1.6 International frameworks for evaluating Sustainable Development and climate change links
Studies that assess the sustainable development impacts of climate change (and vice versa) when they are considering short to medium-term perspectives will be dealing with a number of key current development challenges. This section provides a short introduction to international policy initiatives and decisions that currently offer a framework for addressing development goals.
A key framework that can be used to organize the evaluation of SD and climate change linkages is the WEHAB framework that was introduced by the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 (WSSD, 2002). The WEHAB sectors reflect the areas selected by the parties at the WSSD meeting to emphasize that particular actions were needed in order to implement Agenda 21. Seen from a climate change policy evaluation perspective it would be relevant to add a few more sectors to the WEHAB group in order to facilitate a comprehensive coverage of major SD and climate change linkages. These sectors include human settlements tourism, industry, and transportation. It would also be relevant to consider demography, institutions and various cultural issues and values as cross-cutting sectoral issues.
Climate change policy aspects can also be linked to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that were adopted as major policy targets by the WSSD. The MDGs include nine general goals to eradicate poverty and hunger, health, education, natural resource utilization and preservation, and global partnerships that are formulated for the timeframe up to 2015 (UNDP, 2003a).
A recent report by the CSD (Commission on Sustainable Development) includes a practical plan for how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (CSD, 2005). Climate change is explicitly mentioned in the CSD report as a factor that could worsen the situation of the poor and make it more difficult to meet the MDGs. Furthermore, CSD (2005) suggests adding a number of energy goals to the MDGs (i.e. to reflect energy security and the role that energy access can play in poverty alleviation). Adding energy as a separate component in the MDG framework will establish a stronger link between MDGs and climate change mitigation.
Several international studies and agency initiatives have assessed how the MDGs can be linked to goals for energy-, food-, and water access and to climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation (African Development Bank et al., 2003), and an example of how the link between climate change and MDGs can be further developed to include both adaptation and mitigation is shown in Table 2.1. A linkage between MDGs and development goals is also described very specifically by Shukla (2003) and Shukla et al. (2003) in relation to the official Indian 10th plan for 2002–2007. In the same way, the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) presents a global picture of the relationship between the net gains in human well-being and economic development based on a growing cost through degradation of ecosystem services, and demonstrates how this can pose a barrier to achieving the MDGs (MEA, 2005).
Measuring progress towards SD requires the development and systematic use of a robust set of indicators and measures. Agenda 21 (1992) explicitly recognizes in Chapter 40 that a pre-requisite for action is the collection of data at various levels (local, provincial, national and international), indicating the status and trends of the planet’s ecosystems, natural resources, pollution and socio-economy.
The OECD Ministerial Council decided in 2001 that the regular Economic Surveys of OECD countries should include an evaluation of SD dimensions, and a process for agreeing on SD indicators. These will be used in regular OECD peer reviews of government policies and performance. From the OECD menu of SD issues, the approach is to select a few areas that will be examined in depth, based on specific country relevance (OECD, 2003).
The first OECD evaluation of this kind was structured around three topics that member countries could select from the following list of seven policy areas (OECD, 2004):
- Improving environmental areas:
- - Reducing GHG emissions
- - Reducing air pollutants
- - Reducing water pollution
- - Moving towards sustainable use of renewable and non-renewable natural resources
- - Reducing and improving waste management
- Improving living standards in developing countries.
- Ensuring sustainable retirement income policies.
Most of the attention in the country choice was given to the environmental areas, while evaluation of improving living standards in developing countries was given relatively little attention in this first attempt.
The use of SD indicators for policy evaluations has been applied in technical studies of SD and climate change (Munasinghe, 2002; Atkinson et al., 1997; Markandya et al., 2002). These studies address SD dimensions based on a number of economic, environmental, human and social indicators, including both quantitative and qualitative measurement standards. A practical tool applied in several countries, called the Action Impact Matrix (AIM), has been used to identify, prioritize, and address climate and development synergies and tradeoffs (Munasinghe and Swart, 2005).
All together, it can be concluded that many international institutions and methodological frameworks offer approaches for measuring various SD dimensions, and that these have been related to broader development and economic policies by CSD, the WSSD, and the OECD. Many indexes and measurement approaches exist but, until now, relatively few studies have measured climate change in the context of these indexes. In this way, there is still a relatively weak link between actual measurements of and climate change links.