Most pressing is the fact that climate change and environmental degradation are leading to escalating disasters and vulnerability, which requires radical change across all sectors and systems. For the humanitarian sector, mandated with saving lives and reducing suffering, examining and mitigating its own footprint on the environment should be a clear priority.

For children with moderate malnutrition, it is always necessary to find out the causes of malnutrition. If it is due to chronic diarrhoea or other illnesses and/or incorrect feeding and caring practices, the food ratio alone will not be enough to improve their nutritional status. Nutrition assessment is the best way to determine whether or not people’s nutritional needs are effectively being met, once the food is available and easily accessible. Nutrition assessments provide timely, high-quality, and evidence-based information for setting targets, planning, monitoring, and evaluating programmes aiming at eradicating hunger and reducing the burden of malnutrition by addressing root causes, which often have underlying environmental drivers.

• There are often environmental impacts related to the nutritional assistance provided. These include food waste and related water and soil pollution due to inappropriate food selection; solid waste pollution from packaging and from providing surplus quantities of nutritional inputs

To integrate the environment into rapid/detailed assessments:

• Include an assessment of potential waste and pollution from nutritional assistance, transport, and logistics.
• Assess disease vectors from waste piling, poor solid and organic waste management and poor sanitation, unclean water, and poor hygiene practices.
• Assess unsustainable rates of natural resource depletion, including deforestation.
• Assess land and soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, and damage to ecosystems.
• Assess opportunities to mitigate environmental impacts through assessments and proper management.
• Assess climate change projections to understand their multiplier impact on Nutrition programming.
• Include environment in remote analysis
• Define main trends and criteria to be taken into consideration.
  Including the environment in the remote analysis will help to define the environment core indicators to assess and monitor prior to conducting any assessment. Integrate environmental considerations into Sector indicators or the sources of verification used to monitor sector indicators. Collect and analyse representative data to establish rates of acute malnutrition, infant and young child feeding in order to deliver sufficient and adequate quantities of supplies and avoid the accumulation of supplies.
• Conduct environmental screening (refer to NEAT + tool and/or Cedrig light )
• Identify local environmental sensitivities and stress and the potential environmental impacts of their intervention and options for generating environmental benefits/enhancements.
• Identify nutrition strategies, assets, and coping strategies, considering their effects on the environment.
• Invite environmental actors to participate in sector assessment.This will improve the assessment of crop, tree, and livestock diversity in the area of intervention. This will raise the identification and understanding of factors and cause for unsustainable coping strategies. As well as identifying potential adapted to local context solutions.
• Identify usual patterns or behaviours related to the extraction of natural resources as coping mechanisms and how these have changed as a result of the crisis (if they were happening before and were part of the culture and customs of the communities).
• Investigate and understand the coping mechanisms that have negative effects on the environment in the short and long term in order to facilitate the design of transition mechanisms to less damaging actions.
• Pay attention to communities’ perceptions of environmental issues and concerns
• Facilitated needs assessment with communities. An exploratory process to understand a community’s needs, including but not limited to food security; would be led by communities rather than being based on a survey.
• Establish communication channels with the communities in order to verify existing sustainable coping mechanisms that can be replicated or enforced to strengthen their positive effects.

In addition to providing emergency nutrition support, particular focus should be given to addressing the underlying drivers of nutrition, these are often drought, flood, conflict, displacement, and other humanitarian crises compounded by issues such as poor sanitation, poor hygiene practices, lack of clean water, unsustainable use of natural resources. The protection, restoration, and improvement of the natural environment and strengthening of community norms and values should be mainstreamed throughout the program cycle.

Involve a wider range of agencies:

1. Involve national and local environmental actors in needs assessment planning and analysis. Ask for their help in identifying parameters to assess;
2. Include environmental actors and community organisations with environment-related interests in key informant interviews and organisations involved in natural resource management in community consultations and focus group discussions;
3. Seek advice from global sector environment communities of practice, where these exist;

Data sources and identifying risks:
4. Make use of satellite and remote sensing data – check for environmental issues in the area of intervention that might directly or indirectly worsen humanitarian needs (the UNEP/OCHA Joint Environment Unit has a Remote Environmental Assessment and Analysis Cell which can be activated for major emergencies);
5. Use secondary data such as reports on environmental determinants of health, air pollution, deforestation, water quality, waste management, mining, agricultural pests, and similar. Disaggregated data from other sources such as clinic/hospital admissions can tell you a lot about the environment and its relationship to vulnerable groups;
6. Identify potential environmental risks, including those from the natural environment as well as human or industrial activity. Make use of environmental assessment tools (e.g. NEAT+) and risk maps ; (Especially considering areas of risk in urban or semi-urban settlements.)
You should consider the potential environmental impacts for each of the identified activities. Meanwhile integrating environment into WASH assessment from the beginning will avoid multiple assessments (limiting “assessment fatigue” from the affected population)

For contextualization, relevant assessment questions could be:

– Which are the main environmental problems in the country/region/community (water scarcity, other)?
– Are there sensitive/protected areas in the nearby area (watercourses)?
– What are natural resources traditionally used for? Do male and female users have different priorities?

To assess negative impact specific environmental related questions could be:
– Does the project impact directly on the local environment, specifically on previously identified main environmental issues? This could be the overuse of scarce water resources, or the cutting of trees for construction works.
– Does the project impact indirectly on the environment? (For example use of material brought in from other areas, causing unsustainable harvesting of wood in these locations, or the risk of deforestation as a result of increased population?

Taking a comprehensive approach:
7. Consider people’s coping strategies, the effects that these could have on the environment and the reaction that they could generate from host communities or local authorities;
8. Consider the relationship between environment and security, for example in contexts of informal economies, conflict, competition over natural resources (land, air, water, soil, crops – access and rights to these), disaster risk (e.g. erosion, floods, landslides, etc.) and any specific issues which might affect indigenous or ancestral populations and their cultural heritage (e.g. cemeteries);
9. Many environmental issues are gendered, due to men and women’s roles in society, their relationship to natural resources, the spaces available to them, and activities that they adopt during emergencies. Consider a joint approach to mainstreaming environment and gender

They broadened the needs assessment to look at energy access, water management and forestry. As a result people’s nutritional needs were supported with the following activities:
• 48,500 improved cookstoves adopted.
• 305 schools adopting fuel efficient cooking practices and technologies.
• 63 solar panels installed in Burundi.
• 4 health clinics and 5 schools enabled to provide improved health, nutrition and educational services.
• 1,920 hectares of forest planted/ rehabilitated.
• 3,064,000 trees successfully planted.