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Constructing an Index for Human Dimensions of Water Development!

Constructing an Index for Human Dimensions of Water Development!. Hadi Dowlatabadi SDRI and Liu Center The University of British Columbia University Fellow, Resources For the Future CIS-HDGC, Carnegie Mellon University. Introduction. Who is the client and what is their objective?

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Constructing an Index for Human Dimensions of Water Development!

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  1. Constructing an Index for Human Dimensions of Water Development! Hadi Dowlatabadi SDRI and Liu CenterThe University of British Columbia University Fellow, Resources For the Future CIS-HDGC, Carnegie Mellon University

  2. Introduction • Who is the client and what is their objective? • What makes a useful index? • How are humans different? • What might be used as an indicator of human dimensions of water development? • Findings! 2 HDI WWDR

  3. What is the World Water Development Report about? The World Water Development Report (WWDR) will be a periodic review, continuously updated, designed to give an authoritative picture of the state of the world's freshwater resources and our stewardship of them. The WWDR will be the major component of the UN World Water Assessment Programme. It will contain indicators and analysis that will identify, diagnose and assess: * the effectiveness of societal stewardship of global freshwater resources including the broad institutional and socio-economic context of water resource utilization; * the supply, demand and uses for water and the challenges of extreme events; * current critical problems and emerging threats to freshwater ecosystems and their management. 3 HDI WWDR Source: http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/wwdr/index.shtml

  4. UNESCO’s WWAP IA 4 HDI WWDR Source: http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/wwdr/index.shtml

  5. My criteria for good indices • Be monotonic and unambiguous in interpretation. • Focus attention on critical problems that are amenable to policy interventions. • Even the playing field in dimensions other than that being reported on. • Be based on available evidence, lessening the impact of reporting and monitoring biases. 5 HDI WWDR

  6. Indices should be unambiguous and monotonic • My favourite example of a silly index is from Agenda 21, where personal security was defined in terms of distance from a police station. • If you are near one, is it because there is so much crime that there is a need for a dense network of stations? Or is that locality a hot spot for crime? • Does proximity to the station provide added security or collateral risk? 6 HDI WWDR

  7. Focus attention on policy outcomes • In a management framework, the objective should be to develop indices closely related to the policy levers. • An index distal to policy and its measurable impacts is of little value. • For example, there are many regulations for the protection of the environment, but its their enforcement that matters. An index based on counting how many rules there are is less useful than one that measures the outcome these rules are aimed at. 7 HDI WWDR

  8. Provide a level playing field • If indices are being used to spur action through peer pressure, there is little worse than an unfair comparison. • For example, if the issue is industrial pollution in water, it is unfair to compare Basel and Amsterdam as equivalents. • If a specific problem can be addressed through massive infrastructure investments, it is unfair to compare two regions with vastly different wealth. 8 HDI WWDR

  9. What makes us human? For me, this was the toughest challenge in the project. Here are some of the problems: • How can we define humanity without cultural bias? • What might be a fundamental feature of humanity vis-à-vis other living creatures? 9 HDI WWDR

  10. What shows we are alive? • Life locally halts or reverses the 2nd law of thermodynamics. 10 HDI WWDR

  11. What might be the difference between humans & other animals? • Artefacts? • Is it hard constructs like dams and skyscrapers? Beavers and termites do the same. • Is it monarchies and rules of behaviour? Well the Brits have that, so do their beagles. • Is it problem solving skills and tool building • Knowledge? • Is it learning and being able to pass on that knowledge to others who have been distant from the direct experience? 11 HDI WWDR

  12. If knowledge generation & propagation is the hallmark of humanity … • How would we protect this difference from being lost? • We need to protect long-term storage. • We need to nurture knowledge generators. • These goals can be met by making sure we have members of the society grow to an old age in good health and many children grow up healthy (remember Ray Bardbury’s Fahrenheit 451!). 12 HDI WWDR

  13. Against nature and its selection • If you believe in Darwin, the most important tendency in biology is selection pressure based on fitness for an environmental condition. • I think the defining feature of humanity is how we expend resources to keep a wider spectrum of fitness alive. This wider spectrum has both our youth and our old. The young carry the new genes from which our stock will grow. The elderly carry the memories and experiences that define us. The latter group has lost its relative importance since the advent of literacy. 13 HDI WWDR

  14. Collective resource allocation • In addition to cheating "natural selection" we have the capacity (not always exercised) to balance how we allocate our resources to capital formation vs. operation and maintenance of the system that extracts services from nature. • Social organizations (specifically the confidence to pool resources and lend capital) are key to economic development. • This social allocation of resources can be a critical factor in providing a healthy environment for old and young. 14 HDI WWDR

  15. Possible metrics for HD of development, esp. water? • Life expectancy? • Big impact from basic public health … • Child mortality? • Big response to introduction of vaccines • Child malnutrition? • Would capture water quality and food availability/allocation… 15 HDI WWDR

  16. Life expectancy, income, &social organization 16 HDI WWDR

  17. Income, water availability and malnourished children 17 HDI WWDR

  18. What do income and water explain? 18 HDI WWDR

  19. And the Scores Are: 19 HDI WWDR

  20. Distribution of Scores Doing better and better… 20 HDI WWDR

  21. Summary • I have defined the goal of Human Dimensions of Water Development to be aversion of childhood malnutrition. • I have developed a simple regression model to take out the effect of income and water availability. • What remains is whatever the region does towards achieving this goal, hence the HD Score is a normalised residual to the above regression equation. 21 HDI WWDR

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