Guidance for Evaluation and Learning in Protracted Crisis

How to address environment in humanitarian response evaluations and learnings of protracted crisis

• The extent to which environmental issues have been addressed and how negative environmental impacts have been mitigated (or not) should be part of the final, annual or mid-term evaluation, depending on the project. In protracted crises, evaluation of the humanitarian response should also include the extent to which the response has been adapted to crisis specific conflict patterns that are directly related to environmental factors.
  • Examples include scarcity of natural resources that are part, or even, a reason for the specific conflict, or the influence of climate change on the conflict. For climate change such information might not be readily available and will demand in-depth study (which might not be feasible in all humanitarian contexts).
  • The evaluation should assess whether response activities aggravated or were able to take into account, environmental conflict patterns, and include them into the response. For example, how potential tensions between hosting and refugee communities over resources were considered and mitigated.
  • Further key questions for the evaluation include:
    • Did the project address environmental issues?
    • Did the project have positive and/or negative environmental impacts?
    • What were the effects of these environmental impacts for affected populations?
    • Which lessons for environmental mainstreaming can be learned for future programming?
    • See SIDA’s Evaluation Handbook (p.22) for further examples of how to include environmental considerations in evaluation questions.
• Effective evaluation of environmental impacts depends on the extent of their inclusion into previous stages of the programmes. Good monitoring and data collection practices are required in order to collect the information needed for environmental impact evaluation.
  • Within the UN system, Humanitarian Coordinators should be required to consider the extent to which cluster lead agencies have integrated environmental issues.
• Protracted crises offer the possibility to feed environmental impact evaluations directly into the ongoing response since response operations are reviewed on an annual base. Evaluations can be included in the Operational Peer Review or into Inter-Agency Evaluations.
  • The OPR is an internal, inter-agency peer support tool, which helps determine whether adjustments need to be made to the collective humanitarian response, but not a real-time evaluation. Therefore, take part in the peer review process, which in a protracted crisis is non-mandatory, but may be initiated by a request from the HC/HCT.
  • An Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation is an independent assessment of whether collective results achieved in response to an emergency meet the objectives stated in the response plan and the needs of affected people.
• Include environmental considerations in lessons learned workshops to inform future operations.
  • The Stop/Keep/Start (SKS) process can be utilized to initiate change management.
    • Which activities should be stopped due to their environmental impacts?
    • Based on previous experience, which activities have had positive environmental impacts and should be kept or strengthened?
    • Which actions should the organization start to include to better address environmental issues during sudden-onset emergencies?
• In-depth guidance on the evaluation of environmental impacts can be found in Module Seven of the FRAME Toolkit and the Project Design, Monitoring and Evaluation Module of the Green Recovery and Reconstruction Toolkit (GRRT).