Poverty Environment Partnership Meeting

EfD-K participated in the Poverty Environment Partnership meeting to discuss the mainstreaming of climate and environmet and the Green Economy to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals

EfD-K was represented at the 15th meeting of the Poverty Environment Partnership (PEP 15) by the center coordinator, Dr. Wilfred Nyangena. The meeting took place in March 2010, in Lilongwe, Malawi, and was co-organized by UK Department for International Development, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank, in partnership with the Government of Malawi. The meeting was attended by representatives from bilateral donor organizations, UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Bank, the European Commission, developing and industrialized country governments, African stakeholders, international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and research institutions. The meeting convened under the theme “Climate and Environment Mainstreaming and the Green Economy to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals.” Wilfred gave a present ation on Kenya’s perspective towards a green economy. Using the forestry sector as a case, he showed how undervaluation of the forest sector has affected the government’s allocation of resources to the sector. This situation is also experienced in the other sub-sectors of the environment. The following pre-requisites were highlighted; the need to, have clear and generally acceptable definition of natural resources e.g. forest; develop skills to capture the non-monetized values of these resources; availability of comprehensive quality data for capturing use and non-use forest values; clearly defined property user rights and tenure regimes to avoid leakages; clear benefit sharing mechanisms and capacity (technical, budgetary allocation etc).