Constructing an Index for Human Dimensions of Water Development!

Hadi DowlatabadiSDRI and Liu Center

The University of British Columbia

University Fellow, Resources For the FutureCIS-HDGC, Carnegie Mellon University

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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!

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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.

Source: http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/wwdr/index.shtml

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UNESCO’s WWAP IA

Source: http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/wwdr/index.shtml

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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What makes us human?

For me, this was the toughest challenge in the project. Here are some of the problems:

1. How can we define humanity without cultural bias?

2. What might be a fundamental feature of humanity vis-à-vis other living creatures?

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What shows we are alive?

• Life locally halts or reverses the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

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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?

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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!).

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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.

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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.

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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…

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Life expectancy, income, &social organization

Comparing the impact of social institutions with wealth †

National Group Intercept

(i.e., life expectancy

at no income)

Coefficient for increase in

life expectancy with wealth

(natural log of GDP/cap.)

Adjusted R2

Centrally

planned Asia

25.1 5.9 0.53

Other Asian

nations

34.9 4.2 0.80

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Income, water availability and malnourished children

Correlation between measures of income (GDP/cap (ppp corrected) WaterAvailability (m3/cap) and Childhood malnourishment rate (%).†

% of Children under

age 5 malnourished

GDP per capita (ppp

corrected)

Water

availability

% of Children

under age 5

malnourished 1.000

GDP per capita

(ppp corrected) -0.441 1.000

Water availability -0.135 0.038 1.000

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What do income and water explain?

Regression Result Summary†

Model

Intercept

(i.e., %

Malnutrition at

no income)

Coefficient for

malnutrition with

wealth

(log of GDP/cap.)

Coefficient for

malnutrition with

water availability

(m3/cap.)

Adjusted

R2

Income only 76.33 -17.04 … 0.298

Income &

water

76.02 -16.78 -53.25 e-6 0.293

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And the Scores Are:

Human Development Index(1-5 Scale, with 5 being high)

Region/Nation Score Region/Nation Score Region/Nation Score

Algeria 2.8 Georgia 4.2 Nicaragua 3.2

Angola 0.9 Ghana 2.4 Niger 0.6

Argentina 3.3 Guatemala 1.8 Nigeria 1.5

Armenia 4.1 Haiti 2.5 Oman 1.4

Australia 2.9 Honduras 2.1 Pakistan 1.3

Austria 2.9 India 0.7 Peru 3.0

Azerbaijan 3.8 Indonesia 1.1 Philippines 1.5

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Distribution of Scores

Doing better and better…

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• 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.

Summary