Environmental impacts can be considered to be too small to address if each is treated in isolation. Pollution and environmental degradation from a single shelter project may appear limited. Spread across multiple sites they can lead to water, soil, and air pollution, overloading local capacities for waste management, and unsustainable use of natural resources.

Ensure agencies are assessing and planning for the needs of women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and people living with chronic or terminal health conditions.

Air pollution
Soil pollution
Water pollution
Deforestation
Desertification

1. The environmental impacts of shelter and infrastructure development are not isolated to a single location. The impacts are aggregated across multiple humanitarian responders, local government, community members, and local private companies. Coordination is necessary to jointly assess and mitigate combined impacts such as potential unsustainable natural resource depletion; air, water, soil pollution; increased flood or drought risk; damage to fragile species or ecosystems.

1. The environmental impacts of shelter and infrastructure development can be considered too small to be of signficance if each is considered in isolation. Pollution and environmental degradation from a single shelter project may appear limited. Spread across multiple sites they can lead to water, soil and air pollution, overloading local capacities for waste management and unsustainable use of natural resources.Coorindation is necessary to jointly assess and mitigate combined impacts such as potential unsustainable natural resource depletion; air, water, soil pollution; increased flood or drought risk; damage to fragile species or ecosystems.

1. Shelter cluster joint assessment, including activities of non-members and non-humanitarian actors

1. The Shelter Cluster should undertake a joint assessment of all planned settlements, shelters, infractructure and other planned construction activities, in coordination with local government and including any private constructors such as architects, contractors or even community groups.

ALNAP Paper on cluster coordination finding that most humanitarian coordination platforms act as platforms for information exchange rather than as mechanisms for taking decisions and organising a joint response and most of them do not reach more ambitions coordination goals related to joint or common programming. (Paul Knox Clarke and Leah Campbell: https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/study-coordination-humanitarian-clusters-alnap-2015.pdf)

The number of settlement plans included in shelter cluster joint assessment.

Prevention of environmental damage

This can be incorporated into the normal activities of the Shelter Cluster and standard information sharing. One agency may provide additional capacity to assess, evaluate and share a joint assessment.