Kehmli Devi, a middle-aged Indian woman, bends over her wood-burning stove in her home in northern India. Credit: Athar Parzaiv/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
NEW DELHI, Mar 5 2015 (IPS)

For years, Kehmli Devi, a middle-aged woman from the village of Chachadeth in India’s northern Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, has prepared her family’s meals on a wood-burning stove.

She is one of millions of Indian women who cannot afford cooking gas and so relies heavily on firewood as a source of free fuel.

Gathering wood is a cumbersome exercise, but Devi has no choice. “It takes us five to six hours to gather what we need each day – we have to travel far into the woods to collect it,” she tells IPS. “But we don’t mind, since we don’t have to pay for it.”

“It takes us five to six hours to gather [the firewood] we need each day – we have to travel far into the woods to collect it." -- Kehmli Devi, a housewife in the northern India state of Uttarakhand, who has cooked for years on a wood-burning stove
Buying a cylinder of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), even at subsidized rates, is not an option for her – her entire family makes a collective monthly income of 57 dollars, which works out to less than two dollars a day. They cannot afford to spend a cent of their precious earnings on cleaner fuel.

Further north, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, a similar story unfolds in thousands of households every single day.

“If my husband had enough money, we would use LPG for cooking,” says Zeba Begam, who resides in Rakh, a village in southern Kashmir. But since the family lives well below the poverty line, their only option is to use to firewood.

At first, they struggled to live with the smoke caused by burning large quantities of wood in their small, cramped home. Now, Begam says, they are used to it – but this does not make them immune to the range of health problems linked to indoor air pollution.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around three billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and mud stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste), as well as coal.

Improper burning of such fuels in confined spaces releases a range of dangerous chemical substances including hazardous air pollutants (known as HAPs), fine particle pollution (more commonly called ash) and volatile organic compounds (VOC).

The WHO estimates that around 4.3 million people die each year from diseases attributable to indoor air pollution, including from chronic respiratory conditions such as pneumonia, lung cancer and even strokes.

Other studies show that indoor air pollution – particularly in poorly ventilated dwellings – is linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes in women and negatively impacts children, who are more susceptible to respiratory diseases than adults.

In general, women and children are at far greater risk of suffering the impacts of indoor pollution since they spend longer hours at home.

Millions of Indians at risk

Indoor air pollution is recognised as a pressing issue around the world, particularly in Asia, but India seems to be carrying the lion’s share of the burden, with scores of Indian households relying on traditional fuels for cooking, lighting and heating.

Data from the Government of India’s 2011 Census shows an estimated 75 million rural households (45 percent of total rural households) living without electricity, while 142 million rural households (85 percent of the total) depend entirely on biomass fuel, such as cow-dung and firewood, for cooking.

Despite heavy subsidisation by successive federal governments in New Delhi since 1985 to make cleaner fuels like LPG available to the poor, millions of households still struggle to make the necessary payments for cleaner energy, opting for more traditional, more harmful, substances.

Some estimates put Indian households’ use of traditional fuels at 135 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE), larger than Australia’s total energy consumption in 2013.

Cleaner energy to meet the MDGs

Experts say that there is an urgent need to drastically reduce these numbers, both to improve the lives of millions who will benefit from cleaner energy, and also to meet international poverty-reduction and sustainability targets.

For instance, indoor air pollution is linked in numerous ways to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the U.N.’s largest development initiative set to expire at the end of the year.

According to the WHO, tackling the issue of dirty household fuels will automatically feed into MDG4, which pledges to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by the end of the year; since children bear a disproportionate rate of the disease burden of indoor pollution, helping families switch to cleaner energies could result in longer life spans for their children.

Similarly, women and children spend countless hours collecting firewood, a task that consumes much of their day and a great deal of energy. Reducing this burden on women and children would bring India closer to achieving the goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Less time spent on fuel collection also leaves more hours in the day for education or employment, both of which could contribute to MDG1, eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

In 2005, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) put the economic and health cost of collecting and using firewood at some six billion dollars in India alone, representing massive waste in a country nursing a stubborn poverty rate of 21.9 percent of a population of 1.2 billion people.

For Zeba Begam, a resident of the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir, cooking with clean fuel is a distant dream. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

Moving towards a sustainable future

As the United Nations moves towards a new era of sustainable development, scientists and policy-makers are pushing governments hard to tackle the issue of indoor air pollution in a bid to severely slash overall global carbon emissions.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, director of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego, told IPS that the provision of clean energy, particularly for the poor, should be on the agenda at the upcoming climate talks in Paris, where world leaders are expected to agree on much-awaited binding carbon emissions targets for the coming decade.

Ramanathan argued that it was the responsibility of the rich – what he called the ‘top four billion’ or T4B – to help the ‘bottom three billion’ (B3B) climb the renewable energy ladder instead of the fossil fuel ladder.

“In order to avoid unsustainable climate changes in the coming decades, the decarbonisation of the T4B economy as well as the provision of modern energy access to B3B must begin now,” he said at last month’s Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS).

His words reflect countless international initiatives to cut emissions from dirty household fuels, including the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which estimates that a transition to clean cook-stoves could reduce emissions from wood fuels by up to 17 percent.

Quoting findings from a recent study conducted by experts at Yale University and National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Radha Mutthiah, executive director of the Global Alliance, said last month that her organisation planned to “target areas where clean cooking technology can have the greatest impact, not only improving the effects on climate, but also the health of millions of people living in hotspots.”

These ‘hotspots’ have been defined as regions where firewood is being harvested on an unsustainable scale, with over 50 percent non-renewability. In total some 275 million people live in hotspots, of which 60 percent reside in South Asia.

Overall, India and China were found to have the world’s highest wood-fuel emissions, which experts say should serve as a wake-up call to policymakers and legislators that the time for taking action is now

* This story has been updated. An earlier version carried a quote from a former senior official at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), who has since resigned.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The World Bank has taken an unusual but highly visible step away from traditional economics, encouraging policymakers and development implementers to place far more emphasis on research into local human behaviour when drawing up plans and projects.

Such a focus would strengthen understanding on the ways in which habits, biases and collective impulses impact on interventions in, say, health, education or encouraging personal savings. The bank emphasises that such a focus is important for understanding the behavioural peculiarities of not just poor communities but also policymakers, including those within the World Bank itself.“If you know lots of people who pay taxes, you are more likely to pay taxes. That may be as important or more important as the likelihood of getting caught.” -- Varun Gauri, a co-director of the new WDR

These new prescriptions come in the bank’s most high-profile annual study, the World Development Report (WDR), which was formally released here on Thursday.

“[D]evelopment policy is due for its own redesign based on careful consideration of human factors,” the report states, noting that the analysis draws from findings in behavioural economics, cognitive science, anthropology and other fields.

“Because human decision making is so complicated, predicting how beneficiaries will respond to particular interventions is a challenge. The process of devising and implementing development policy would benefit from richer diagnoses of behavioural drivers … and early experimentation.”

The World Development Report is a thematic study, and since its introduction in the late 1970s has generally focused on issues of traditional priority for development policy – jobs, gender, agriculture, etc. Members of the World Bank’s leadership admit that the focus of this year’s WDR – formally subtitled “Mind, Society, and Behaviour” – was a gamble.

Yet they also say that a greater focus on human behaviour throughout the process of creating development policy could have a landmark impact on efficacy, efficiency and other goals that ultimately make the difference between a successful versus middling intervention.

“The use of these methods in the development policy world is very minimal, and all of the motivations for doing this World Development Report were precisely because of that deficiency,” Kaushik Basu, a senior vice president and chief economist at the bank, told IPS.

“So there’s real a possibility of … a paradigm adjustment, whereby governments, development practitioners and others make use of this new range of instruments available to improve delivery to the doorstep. I feel the scope for that is huge.”

Private sector lessons

Traditional economics views human decision-making as straightforward and rational, based on a clean mix of self-interest and logic. Yet the WDR cites copious research over the past decade or more indicating that, in fact, humans arrive at decisions due to a variety of factors, many of which are immediate and unrelated to the broader issue under consideration.

On the one hand, for instance, the World Bank points to research suggesting that poverty and crisis situations make it increasingly difficult for many people to make rational or long-term decisions. On the other hand, the report notes that people can often be “unexpectedly generous”.

The private sector, of course, has known about and directly exploited approaches offered by the behavioural and cognitive sciences for years. Indeed, rarely is a new advertisement or product publicly offered before being extensively considered from a variety of such perspectives.

Yet this is new territory for the bank, and for much of the development world.

“The World Bank is quite dogmatically wedded to the idea of free markets, information about pricing, rational decision-making. So for them to take a step back and highlight the additional information out there that might help remove limitations – that’s very good,” Hans Bos, the vice president and director of the International Development, Evaluation, and Research (IDER) programme at the American Institutes for Research, told IPS.

“What this report didn’t do very well is to explain the practical implications of following these approaches. In order to really know what is working in a local context you need to keep testing things, but we can’t spend three-quarters of the development budget on research. So we need to come up with a better way to do research.”

The World Bank is now hoping that by putting its stamp of approval on this body of research, and by using its global influence, it can spur additional related research. It is also hoping to convince development policymakers to take human behaviour – particularly local behaviour – into account when designing with new projects.

“For example, can simplifying the enrolment process for financial aid increase participation? Can changing the timing of fertilizer purchases to coincide with harvest earnings increase the rate of use?” the report asks.

“Can marketing a social norm of safe driving reduce accident rates? Can providing information about the energy consumption of neighbours induce individuals to conserve?”

This latter issue, of the collective social impact on individual decision-making, is a key one, the WDR’s researchers note.

“If you know lots of people who pay taxes, you are more likely to pay taxes. That may be as important or more important as the likelihood of getting caught,” Varun Gauri, a co-director of the new WDR, told IPS.

“That increase in tax receipts would have a huge impact on development prospects in a number of countries [in terms of] law-abidingness and corruption or other areas where you could have large, paradigm-changing impact.”

Self-reflection

Gauri notes that many of the factors that need to be taken into consideration regarding communities receiving development interventions – their biases, their potential illogic – should also be applied to policymakers designing these interventions.

“A lot of the findings that have been conducted to date focus on households and consumers and their choices. But these findings apply to everybody, including to policymakers themselves,” Guari says.

“So to the extent that these findings can have a huge paradigm-shifting impact, it may be as a result of policymakers themselves thinking through their own biases, thinking through the cognitive illusions they’re under before they make policies for an entire country.”

This self-reflexive tone is welcome, the American Institutes for Research’s Bos says. Indeed, he suggests it should have been the report’s primary focus.

“I think this report would have been far more powerful if it had started with analysis of [the World Bank’s] own practices,” he says.

“Often it’s much easier for us rational donors to change how we do our business than it is to go into a poor country and tell them how to do things differently. Starting with ourselves would be a far better way of applying these lessons.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Flooding in areas near the malecón, or seaside drive, in Havana is increasing in intensity and frequency, according to a study by the Institute of Meteorology. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 2013 (IPS)

Successful risk management can be a powerful tool for development, the World Bank said Monday in its annual World Development Report (WDR).

The WDR is the Bank’s most comprehensive publication, released yearly since 1978. This year’s report looks at how managing risks, ranging from economic crises to natural catastrophes and health disasters, can end poverty and increase equity.“If governments look at development as an investment, they’ll necessarily have to address the crucial question of what are its expected returns.” -- Georgetown's Bardia Kamrad

“Risk management can save lives, avert economic damages, and can provide resilience and prosperity by allowing people to undertake new endeavours,” Norman Loayza, director of the 2014 WDR, said at the report’s launch here in Washington.

A term usually associated with finance, risk management in development looks at those sets of policies that can help alleviate the negative effects of natural disasters, economic shocks, or health crises.

“A practical example of successful risk management would be for a flood-prone country to allocate funds for simple projects such as building dams, or making sure houses are built on stilts,” Anne Ralte, the director for the Monitoring and Evaluation programme at the International Relief  and Development (IRD), a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

Loayza and his team are warning that there are currently several obstacles to successful risk management in pursuit of development aims. These include the behavioural failures of decision-makers, lack of resources, and low levels of information with which to make decisions.

The report suggests that poor risk management has resulted in a staggering child mortality rate from illness and injury in low-income countries – a rate 20 times higher than in high-income countries. Poor risk management has also led to more people dying from droughts in Africa than from any other natural disaster.

For instance, a farmer’s ability to withstand a drought can be considerably affected by how previous yields were managed. It will be up to local governments to ensure that the proper agricultural strategies to counter droughts are in place.

Yet if governments and decision-makers can create successful environments for managing risks, these trends can be reversed, Loayza suggests. In the vision laid out in the report, governments should be at the forefront of this effort, by providing tools for risk management in the financial sector and by creating a risk-free environment for vulnerable people.

“We’re advocating a sea change in the way risk is managed,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said Monday. “Our new approach calls for individuals and institutions to shift from being ‘crisis fighters’ to proactive and systematic risk managers.”

Seeing through such changes, Kim suggests, will “help build resilience, protect hard-won development gains, and move us closer to … ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.”

Investment perspective

Governments and international institutions are at the centre of this new strategy. Decision-makers are called upon to take a number of preventive measures aimed at limiting the uncertainty that is associated with risks.

Bardia Kamrad, a professor and an expert on risk management at Georgetown University’s School of Business, here in Washington, says that one way governments can approach this new idea would be by looking at development as an investment.

“If governments look at development as an investment, they’ll necessarily have to address the crucial question of what are its expected returns,” Kamrad told IPS. “Asking that sort of question would be a great starting point for governments to create the right kind of risk management environment.”

Once development is seen as an investment, he suggests, the international community could more easily tackle the inherent risks associated with it, such as financial shocks and natural disasters.

“If governments around the world start taking an active role in managing these risks, this can be very meaningful,” he says. “The best way would be for governments to actively absorb the risks the WDR identifies.”

He cites macro-level risk analysis and better management of information as potential government strategies.

Indeed, beyond top-down processes, the WDR also finds that preparing people for potential risks induces them to be less risk averse in the first place. For instance, having access to rainfall insurance can encourage farmers to invest in fertiliser, seeds and other such products, instead of refraining from spending money for fear of future droughts.

These are the types of strategies the World Bank is now calling on governments around the world to focus upon in coming years.

At the same time, there are areas where the report may be lacking, says Tom Mitchell of the London-based Overseas Development Institute. He notes that the report is missing a careful analysis of future developments.

“Despite highlighting dynamic risk contexts, there is precious little analysis of the future,” Mitchell said Monday in a statement. “[For] an organisation so publicly focused on ending extreme poverty by 2030, this missing context and perspective is strange.”

However, “risk management in today’s world has taken on a very new perspective and structure,” Kamrad says. “The new WDR shows that we’re heading in the right direction.”

Uncertainty

The publication of the WDR also marks a new way of functioning for the World Bank itself. The new strategy will now see the World Bank including uncertainty- and risk-related components to its country partnership frameworks, the overarching processes that define the bank’s relationships with individual countries.

“So far, [the World Bank] has been very risk-averse, trying to avoid risks when we are faced with uncertainty,” the WDR’s Loayza says. “Instead, we should actively tackle uncertainty with rigorous risk management.”

Indeed, although there are several downsides to uncertainty, there is also a positive side to it, Georgetown University’s Kamrad says.

“If we look at the upsides of uncertainty, we’ll realise that there are also many opportunities involved with risks,” he told IPS. “If risks are properly managed, and governments implement strategies that successfully mitigate risks, we’ll block the downsides of uncertainty and benefit from its upsides.”

This means that, instead of avoiding risks, governments will need to adopt a more preventive approach. Countering financial shocks and taking steps to prepare for or mitigate natural disasters means that governments will increasingly need to strengthen their banking sectors, and build stronger infrastructure that can better counter natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis.