Integration of environmental issues into food security assessments will ensure that environmental harm is reduced or eliminated and environmental benefits are maximized. When assessing environmental issues, understanding the specific context is critical to avoid negative impacts.

Interventions that focus on realizing short-term benefits and neglect consideration of the environment can jeopardize long-term food security opportunities. This reduces societal resilience and undermines recovery opportunities. Assessments and proper management from the very beginning of a humanitarian crisis permit to minimize and addressing these environmental impacts.

Implementing food security programs sensitive to environmental and climatic conditions supports sustainable interactions with the environment while ensuring current and future food security and access to water and energy. This is particularly important considering the increasing external pressures from climate change and natural hazards.

Most pressing is the fact that climate change and environmental degradation are leading to escalating disasters and vulnerability, calling for 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.

• Environmental impacts undermine the short- and long-term effectiveness and sustainability of livelihoods programming outcomes and can exacerbate existing or introduce new environmental challenges. This can also lead to a loss of biodiversity, degradation of the environment impede future recovery efforts as well as diminish community resilience.
• A key concern from overlooking environmental considerations during programming is the increase in future vulnerability of the targeted area to hazards, such as plague, pest, and disease. The provisioning capacity of local ecosystems can also be diminished, leading to future challenges for food, water, and energy provisioning. Programming activities that do not properly manage (or encourage/facilitate proper management of) waste streams, pollution can also lead to public health risks through vector transmission and/or pollution.
• Deforestation, and water and soil degradation effects as a consequence of inaccurate measurement of information on food security.
• Understanding the coping mechanisms and strategies the people use to survive, allows for an adequate design of delivery solutions in terms of food security issues. This means that when the actions that the people perform are known, strategies can be successfully implemented to avoid damaging effects on the environment. For example, as the first resource for cooking fuel, people may start to cut down trees or clean up forested areas to keep livestock. both actions negatively affect the environment and increase the risk of erosion and possible flooding events in the future.
• Climate change acts as an environmental threat and impacts multiplier in food security programming. Climate change is increase the frequency and severity of climate-related hazards (such as droughts, floods, storms, and extreme temperatures). Environmental degradation is worsening the adverse impacts of disasters and aggravating vulnerability conditions. Programming needs to acknowledge potential risks, and exposure should be reduced while increasing resilience to climate variability and change. The capacity of the local environment to provide key services, such as resource provisioning or natural protection against hazards, should be safeguarded.

• 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.

To integrate the environment into rapid/detailed assessments:

• 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 food security support, particular focus should be given to recovery, strengthening, and diversification. The potential environmental impacts of these activities should be assessed, they may increase drought or flood, or conflict risk. Displacement and other humanitarian crises may be 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.

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.

Identify financial, physical, social, human, and natural assets available for livelihoods. Include environment markers into the livelihoods baseline to be monitored throughout the entire programme. Identify the hazard context, the risk factors, besides the vulnerability conditions and existing coping capacities.

Include environmental expertise within the project assessment and design team. For example, avoid no new species introduction as an element of a livelihood project. If a new species must be introduced, conduct research or consult experts in order to determine if the species has the potential to escape the target project area, threaten other species, and cause environmental harm. Beneficiaries should be informed and trained in ways they can minimize threats from nonnative introduced species.

Identify the vulnerability context related to pre-existing conditions, trends, and seasonality. As an example for gender pre-existing conditions, define what are the livelihoods roles of women and men, boys and girls, and how have these changed in the crisis? How do other aspects of diversity affect livelihoods and their impact on the environment? Who has lost what? Are there social or cultural restrictions affecting livelihoods choices that can have a detrimental impact on the environment? What barriers exist to accessing viable environmentally friendly livelihood opportunities?

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 the 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’s 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