Poverty, Environmental Risk, Conflict, and Governance – Part 2

This is part two of two sessions designed to provide answers to and facilitate further discussions about how societies can continue to reduce poverty amidst the challenges of environmental change and conflict. We do so by bringing together researchers who utilize novel approaches to elucidate how individuals, often children, are affected by environmental externalities – the changes they are exposed to and must accommodate. Part one of the session will consist of four presentations followed by a question-and-answer session chaired by Delamónica, UNICEF Statistics and Monitoring Senior Adviser for Child Poverty and Gender Equality.

In this part two of our session on Poverty, Environmental Risk, Conflict, and Governance we start with issues related to deforestation and poverty. Deforestation is the second largest source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, posing a major threat to biodiversity, affecting climate and global weather systems, and contributing to soil erosion, desertification, and increased flood risks. Simultaneously, the utilization of forest resources and the transformation of forests into farmland offer opportunities for people to improve their economic situation. Thus, from a societal perspective, deforestation is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon closely linked to people’s living conditions. In our fourth presentation, Ekbrand, Halleröd, and Zhang delve into the relationship between deforestation and changes in people’s living conditions, particularly in the local areas where deforestation occurs. Initial analyses focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa confirm that deforestation is associated with improved living conditions in some areas, while in others, it leads to a deterioration of living conditions. The presentation will showcase results from analyses based on the novel Interpretable Configurational Regression method. By utilizing machine learning, this method identifies patterns in data, such as areas sharing commonalities in the causes and consequences of deforestation. This enables us to pinpoint the economic and social circumstances under which deforestation can be linked to improved, deteriorating, or unchanged living conditions. Such insights are crucial for devising strategies to prevent deforestation while simultaneously enhancing the quality of life in local areas.

To halt deforestation and, if possible, reverse the depletion of other biospheres, the need for effective measures to protect valuable areas is paramount. The recent global commitment to expand protected areas to 30% of Earth’s surface by 2030 represents the most ambitious measure taken thus far to achieve this goal. However, it also highlights the conflicts between nature conservation and human activities. While public support for this goal is central to its achievement, there is limited knowledge about public opinion regarding how and where such expansion should occur. In the fifth presentation, Michaelsen, Sundström, and Jagers will present the first survey of public opinion across countries 9 countries (Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the US) focusing on attitudes towards the expansion of protected areas. Questions such as who should fund this expansion and by what principles should these areas be established will be addressed. They employ a conjoint analysis to experimentally test how different descriptions of global and local principles guiding such expansion affect support for protected area expansion. The results from these comprehensive surveys will provide novel insights into the various conditions under which nature protection policies are accepted among the public. By necessity, a better understanding of the relationship between externalities such as environmental changes or armed conflicts and people’s living conditions depends on observational studies. These types of studies require adjustment for confounding factors that are correlated with both the environmental changes and living conditions. In settings where the observed variables are quantities such as average income in a neighbourhood, tools have been developed to address such confounding. However, in many parts of the world, information about local communities may be scarce. In this context, satellite imagery can play an important role, serving as a proxy for the confounding variables otherwise unobserved.

In this final presentation, Daoud discusses confounder adjustment, where patterns or objects found in satellite images contribute to the confounder bias. Using the evaluation of anti-poverty aid programs in Africa as a running example, Daoud provides examples of conditions that are sufficient to identify causal effects, how to perform estimation, and how to quantify the ways in which certain aspects of the unstructured image object are most predictive of the treatment decision. Finally, he demonstrates how to apply these tools in estimating the effect of anti-poverty interventions in African communities using satellite imagery.

Underpinning of all these analyses are data, which can often be a limiting factor when conducting inter-disciplinary research on complex, wicked-problems such as the links between environment, climate and poverty, health and child deprivation. The UN has called for a Data Revolution to produce more and better data to underpin the mapping and monitoring of progress towards the SDGs. In this talk Watmough discusses his experiences of the Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF in using data to explore a range of child rights related research projects. Including combining satellite data, climate models and household surveys to examine the seasonality in child nutrition, gender related barriers to vaccinating children, estimating the impact of travel time to health centres on child poverty and estimating child deprivation at fine spatial resolutions in Iraq. Finally, the recent release of gridded estimates of wealth in LMICs will be discussed in terms of its practical uses for policy and SDG tracking.