Guidance for Evaluation and Learning in Sudden Onset Emergencies

How to address environment in humanitarian response evaluations and learnings of sudden onset emergencies

• 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.
  • Include environmental performance in the Operational Peer Review (OPR), or any equivalent internal peer review process.
  • 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.
  • Organization-wide policies on environmental performance help to ensure environmental mainstreaming throughout the review and evaluation (for example the environmental procedures of USAID and the environmental criteria in the NGO guidelines of DFID)
  • Within the UN system, Humanitarian Coordinators should be required to consider the extent to which cluster lead agencies have integrated environmental issues.
• 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?
• Use the evaluation as a learning tool to produce concrete recommendations to inform environmental mainstreaming across the project cycle in future programming.
• Detailed 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).