Guidance for Response Monitoring in Sudden Onset Crises

Environmental response monitoring how to guidance for sudden onset emergencies

• Monitoring needs to relate to baseline information from earlier environmental assessments and analyses conducted during preparedness and/or initial stages of the emergency. Environmental impacts are monitored against the established baseline.
  • Monitoring is essential to determine whether an activity should be discontinued or adapted due to its environmental impact.
  • The perspective of local communities on perceived environmental changes (e.g. changes to livelihood practices due to environmental issues) is an important source of information for monitoring environmental impacts.
  • If a Rapid Environmental Assessment (REA) [LINK to REA resource] has been conducted, REA updates can provide information useful to monitor progress toward objectives and changes in impact on the environment.
• Monitoring environmental impacts can be difficult in certain instances as some environmental indicators can be affected by seasonality and timing. Requesting technical expertise and engaging local environmental actors for assistance can help to determine if measurements are appropriate. Three key sources of environmental impacts require monitoring throughout the sudden-onset disaster:
  • Direct environmental consequences of the natural or technological hazard that caused the emergency.
  • Environmental consequences of relief operations.
  • The impact of unmet basic needs of affected people on the local environment.
• When it comes to response monitoring, clear indicators must be defined that relate to the type of emergency response and environmental context.
  • Tracking environmental indicators is directly linked to Information and Data Sharing since environmental monitoring requires good data collection practices.
  • Guidance on specific environmental indicators and monitoring can be found in the Project Design, Monitoring and Evaluation Module of the Green Recovery and Reconstruction Toolkit (GRRT).
  • See here and here for various examples of environmental indicators by the UN Statistics Division.
• Organizations working with an overarching Response Monitoring Framework (RMF) should advocate for the inclusion of environmental indicators into the RMF at higher level, such as the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT).
  • Make use of existing reference indicators within the humanitarian indicator registry that include environmental considerations – for example the shelter cluster indicator: the percentage of energy/fuel interventions that take into account the environment.
  • Organizations which are involved in humanitarian action as part of a cluster should report their activities against the key indicators of the RMF and highlight environmental considerations in relation to the reference indicators, which can be found on https://ir.hpc.tools/.
• For later stage evaluations it is imperative to implement good monitoring practices, otherwise it will be difficult to do a thorough evaluation due to a lack of data and information.