environment

The physical environment provides both displaced and local populations with essential resources with which to maintain their livelihoods: water for drinking, cooking, washing, laundry, and sanitation; fuel for cooking; materials for construction; and food from agriculture and animal husbandry. The management of these resources is essential to development and must be considered in the TS response. Great care must be taken to ensure the sustainable use of natural resources, and to prevent conflicts arising from competition over access.

natural-resource management

Natural-resource management (NRM) must be considered at every level of planning, because damage to the environment and to relations with local communities is difficult to repair. Currently, most environmental programmes in the field must aim to mitigate avoidable damage, because environmental considerations were not

taken into account in the planning process. Forward-looking environmental programmes need not be complex or costly. They can be designed to encourage local policies and practices to include environmental considerations, in addition to defining or enforcing new practices. It is also important to include environmental considerations in contractual agreements from the outset, to ensure that they are part of the overall environmental strategy.

The UNHCR Environment Unit has developed, along with other bodies, considerable practical advice on NRM by refugees. Most of the advice is relevant for all displaced populations (UNHCR 1996; 1998 a/b/c/d/e; 2002a). The Unit recommends that all stakeholders should be involved from the emergency phase onwards, in particular the local and displaced populations and local authorities. The aim of such co-ordination is to enable the stakeholders to discuss the various options and measures to be taken, and to agree to the following initiatives.

• Strengthen or establish NRM co-ordination committees, such as

local forestry departments and agricultural co-operatives, ensuring the inclusion of representatives from both the local and displaced populations.

• Involve local and displaced populations in measures to protect

local environmental resources and support NRM, in the interests of achieving sustainability.

• Develop clear policies on access and user rights to natural

resources, defining the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders.

• Raise awareness among displaced populations of the

environmental rules and regulations of the locality, by means of organised meetings and possibly the display of signs and posters. Establishing ownership of and user rights to environmental resources is essential for effective and sustainable NRM, as well as successful rehabilitation. Access to environmental resources, and rights to use them, may act as incentives for displaced populations and local communities to take part in environment-protection activities. For instance, if a displaced family are given responsibility for managing a patch of fruit trees, in return for benefiting from the harvest, they will naturally be more inclined to protect the trees. When user rights are not made clear, people generally have little interest in managing natural resources.

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settlement, such as planned camps, and ways to mitigate them. Perhaps the most important lesson to learn is that high-density settlement should be avoided whenever possible.

Where high-density settlement is unavoidable, planning for environmental sustainability is often the key to the sustainability of the settlement itself. There is evidence, for example, that severe environmental degradation has influenced decisions of certain countries not to grant asylum to refugees and other displaced persons.

Small plots limit the opportunity for tree planting and create an imbalance between supply and demand for natural resources. An

area of 200–300m2 _{per plot is the current recommended}

compromise for ensuring appropriate social control and protection, maintaining vegetation, and avoiding the spread of camps over an area so large that infrastructure and maintenance become unsustainable for the aid community or host government.

The larger the plot, however, the greater the area over which a displaced family is able to take some management responsibility, and over which it can exert control. Effective NRM in displaced settlements is more likely where family plots are large. Tree planting and the protection of existing vegetation is practical only on house- hold plots, because common areas within a settlement are difficult to protect. Thus the larger the plot allocated to a family, the greater the area that benefits from some form of assured management. Planting within camps, particularly on household plots, normally achieves high survival rates and is of immediate social benefit. Seedling production to supply such programmes should be decentralised to local community groups and displaced groups as early as possible.

An alternative to planting on private plots is to establish independent plantations. While plantations may help to respond to host govern- ments’ concerns that tree cover has been damaged, the provision of new trees may be inappropriate, for several reasons. If previously uncultivated land is opened up by displaced populations, there is a chance, particularly where the supply of land is short, that it will continue to be cultivated by locals if the displaced leave the area. It is essential to protect environmental resources strictly, and to

monitor their use. This includes regulating the harvesting of wood, grasses, wild foods, and wild animals, perhaps zoning different areas for use on a rotational basis. It also involves the strategic designation of no-cutting zones, to promote their use as genetic banks for eventual regeneration. Particularly sensitive ecological zones might need to be closed off completely in order to protect them. Possible ways to reduce the consumption of natural resources include attaching either a monetary value or an in-kind exchange value to them. These methods may be more effective than enforcing the protection of natural resources through regulatory means, or they may be combined with regulation and the deployment of forest guards.

Deforestation can be discouraged by marking certain trees which it is permitted to cut, or marking sites from where materials are permitted to be collected, and appointing guards to direct and control activities. When there has been deforestation on public land, it is usually most effective to promote regeneration and managed harvesting. This is likely to make a much more significant contribution than tree planting, even when planting is on a large scale. When trees are planted or protected, as part of a damage- mitigation or environment-rehabilitation strategy, it is imperative to establish the ownership rights of the eventual users of the trees clearly at the outset.

In later phases, environment protection and rehabilitation should aim to restore the capacity of the local community to derive a sustainable livelihood from their natural-resource base. At the same time, the displaced populations should be offered the environmental resources to sustain a livelihood over the period of their displacement, regardless of the form of their durable settlement solution. This dual aim should be pursued because sustainable livelihoods will bring advantages to all stakeholders, creating increased social and economic autonomy (UNHCR 2002e). The UNHCR Environment Unit offers a series of guidelines on NRM in refugee situations (www.unhcr.ch). CARE has developed a Rapid Environmental Assessment (REA) tool (Kelly 2001).

planned and self-settled camps

Much of the existing literature on environmental issues is focused on the negative impacts of high-density grouped transitional

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most cases it is likely that the priority will be to safeguard the local environment before any issues of global environmental sustainability are considered. In recent years, however, the issue of both local and global environmental accountability has become of increasing importance to all stakeholders. So it is important to understand how to judge the impact of transitional settlement on the global environment.

For the purposes of these guidelines, the effect of transitional settlement on the global environment may usefully be approximated to the energy cost of a settlement (UNHCR 1998a). There are three main contributions to the energy cost: the embodied energy of building materials and the energy used in their transportation on the one hand, and the energy cost incurred during the running and maintenance of the settlement on the other.

embodied energy

‘Embodied energy’ is the amount of energy required to fabricate a given material. In the context of transitional settlement, many important imported construction materials, such as plastic sheeting and fired bricks, contain significant embodied energy through their manufacturing processes.

energy for transporting materials

Often transitional settlement makes use of materials that have been imported regionally or internationally. This involves transportation, which carries an environmental cost as well as an economic cost.

maintenance costs

The fuel required for cooking and heating by the displaced persons and relief workers may be significantly greater than the amount that can be harvested sustainably on a local scale, or even on a regional scale. This may result in deforestation and soil erosion, which may, over time, have a negative impact on the global environment.