Greening Aid: Short Term Benefits, Long Term Costs

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

For previous posts in the series, see here.

Short Term Benefits, Long Term Costs

While environmental groups were substantively ignored for a long time (yes, I’m talking to you Senator Inhofe), aid organizations made and are still making environmental mistakes.

For instance, I visited the Millennium Village Project in Sauri, Kenya. While I think they have a worthwhile experiment going on, they were also promoting fertilizers and pesticides as part of trying to help create a “green revolution” for Africa. Green in this case certainly refers to the color of plants because use of inputs like these is far from environmentally friendly.

In the short term, we get more food with less work. In the long term, we kill the earthworms that make new soil for us and leach chemicals into our streams and water tables, reducing fish populations (another kind of food) and hurting humans who drink the water.

That’s an example of aid gone wrong, but there are far more situations where opportunities are lost. Some of the biggest challenges of our time will be finding ways to sustainably manage those basic ingredients. These challenges will cut across the world—developed, developing and least developed. Many of them will come to dire straits within our lifetime (adequate fresh water and fertile land for instance).

Less developed countries are often much better set up to change the way they do things than those of us in richer nations. Take toilets, for instance. Some development organizations have indeed begun to break through the environmental wall and are promoting “ecological sanitation,” meaning that there’s a way to return poop safely to the soil.

In the developed world, it will be harder and a lot more political. How many miles of sewer systems do we have? How many people working in water treatment plants? How many government agencies that will need to be restructured? A lot.

[Photo of the Millennium Village Project from www.worldchanging.com]