David Niemeijer

Developing indicators for environmental policy: data-driven and theory-driven approaches examined by example

Abstract This paper investigates the issues involved with environmental indicator development for policy by looking at three recent examples from data and theory-driven approaches. The “Environmental Sustainability Index 2001” report from World Economic Forum, YCELP and CIESIN is taken as an example of the data-driven approach, whereby data availability is the central criterion for indicator development and data is provided for all selected indicators. The other two examples are theory-driven, whereby, the focus is on selecting the best possible indicators from a theoretical point of view and data availability is considered only one of the aspects involved. These examples are the Heinz Center’s1999 report on the “State of the Nation’s Ecosystems” and the US National Research Council (NRC) report on “Ecological Indicators for the Nation”. The reports and approaches are discussed and compared in order to determine their strengths and weaknesses. From this lessons are drawn for future environmental indicator work as a basis for policymaking. In the conclusions four important issues are addressed: (1) data availability; (2) ecosystem specificity of indicators; (3) spatial and conceptual aggregation of indicators and (4) baseline or reference values for indicators. For each of these issues recommendations are made.

The Cultural Economy of Soil and Water Conservation: Market Principles and Social Networks in Eastern Burkina Faso

Soil and water conservation interventions in Africa have had a chequered history, calling into question the way in which soil and water conservation technologies have been studied in the past. This article draws on a case study from eastern Burkina Faso to explore an area usually ignored by soil and water conservation studies — the role of social institutions in guiding decisions regarding the use of technologies. It looks at soil and water conservation through the historical development of what the authors call the ‘cultural economy’, that is, a system of exchange in which a market economy has mixed with pre-existing forms of exchange. The approach adopted by the authors identifies concepts on which the cultural economy is based and uses these ideas to analyse institutions that affect the choice of soil and water conservation technologies. The article shows how this approach leads to a reconceptualization of the ways in which soil and water conservation technologies are to be considered.

Population Growth and the Environment in Africa: Local Informal Institutions, the Missing Link

Abstract Population and environment debates regarding Africa, whether Malthusian or Boserupian in nature, focus on population levels as the driving force behind the relationship between environment and society. This article argues, instead, that how people adjust to their rise in numbers is more important than are population levels. It focuses on the role of local informal institutions, such as land tenure systems, but also on customs, norms, and networks, and their change over time in mediating the relationship between people and the environment. The article is based on fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 1998 in the Sahelian and Sudano-Sahelian zones of Africa, as well as on a review of colonial documents pertaining to the area written in the first half of the twentieth century. The article concludes that adaptations made to local, informal institutions within the past century have enabled an environmentally sustainable land use within the context of a rising population and growing scarcity of natural resources.

Why do savings institutions differ within the same region? The role of environment and social capital in the creation of savings arrangements in eastern Burkina Faso

The paper describes two different savings arrangements around cattle that have been developed in two villages in the eastern region of Burkina Faso and raises the question of why two forms have evolved in the same region, populated by the same ethnic groups, and where crop and livestock production systems are similar. It is argued that while the general system of keeping savings in cattle developed out of specific social, economic and environmental trends within the 20th Century, the difference between the two systems is due to social capital endowments and environmental characteristics. The paper is based on 3 years of fieldwork between 1995 and 1998 and makes use of observation, key informant interviews and a budget study of 35 married individuals over a 2-year period.

Commentary: Discrepancies about Soil Degradation

read with interest the clear report of David Niemeijer and Valentina Mazzucato’s findings on soil degradation in the Sahel region of West Africa in the March 2002 issue of Environment.’ Their data are convincing, and it can be agreed that there is a need for more thorough work on the subject. However, the discrepancies that the authors highlight between their results (which dispute widespread degradation) and earlier, more broadscale work based on modeling and limited field data are only apparent rather than real. Arable land (and some permanent crops) covered some 8 percent (2.1 million hectares) of Burkina Faso’s land area in the early 1960s and about 12 percent (3.45 million hectares) in 199K2 Very low grain yields, which rose from some 0.6 metric tons per hectare (t/ha) in 1961 to some 0.8 t/ha in 1998, were supported by manure from livestock grazing on arable land not currently used for farming-the much larger area farther from the homesteads. In Niemeijer and Mazzucato’s bar graph of soil fertility in the farmed and homestead soils (compound fields) versus other land such as bush fields, it appears that there is a considerable ongoing transfer of plant nutrients from the grazed areas to the farmed and homestead fields3 The effect is particularly clear for potassium, which is concentrated near the homestead through livestock excreta (because livestock are gathered in the evening near the homestead). The slow increase in yields over the last few decades-less than 2 percent per year-is probably due to a gradual intensification of crop management, as posited by Niemeijer and Mazzucato. This intensification includes more careful plant nutrient transfer to farmed land through livestock, somewhat better weeding, varietal selection, and a change in fertilizer use on grain crops from zero in the early 1960s to some 1.5 kilograms per hectare (kgha) in 1991 and probably 3 4 kgha in 1998. Such fertilizer use alone, at commonly found fertilizer use efficiencies, could explain about one-quarter of the yield increases. (National fertilizer consumption was about 100 metric tons in 1961, about 20,000 in 1991, and 50,000 in 1998; application rates were about 15 kgha in 1991, ranging from 1.5 kgha on grains to 25 kgha on ~o t ton .~ ) Irrigation (2,000 ha in the 1960s, rising to some 25,000 ha in 1998) amounts to less than 1 percent of the extent of arable land plus permanent crops; it could not have had a significant influence on national average sorghum or millet yie1ds.j However, deforestation probably provided major extents of new, nondegraded land to agriculture over the last four decadesslightly more than 15,000 ha per year over the last decade alone.6 Clearly, plant nutrient mining does not take place on more intensively used land, which the farmers attempt to maintain or improve, but rather on grazing land away from the homesteads and probably on newly deforested land. It would be very useful to monitor the soil fertility of those types of land over a long period. The slow increase in yields over the last few decades is probably due to a gradual i n tens if ica t i o n of crop management.