Today, the majority of leaders acknowledge the degradation of natural capital and the urgent need to protect the environment. Nevertheless, in order to define appropriate public policies, they must be able to rely on scientific standards that allow them to assess the state of a territory’s natural capital.

It remains difficult to assess this state, or even to define exactly what a "good state" of the planet should be: most existing instruments have an incomplete definition of environmental sustainability, lack of relevant indicators or fail to set appropriate targets to achieve good environmental status. There is therefore no satisfactory approach that would allow decision-makers or experts to know whether a country is moving towards environmental sustainability.

Based on a dashboard assessing the state of 23 environmental components, the ESGAP framework aims to address this need. However, the lack of appropriate standards for many essential natural capital contributions and in many countries is one of the most notable gaps identified in the ESGAP pilot projects in New Caledonia, Kenya and Vietnam.

Watch the video: How to measure the state of the planet?

This research project with EcoAct aimed to identify missing standards for several components of the Environmental Sustainability Gap (ESGAP). It discusses possible strategies to develop appropriate standards in the event that no standards are available globally.

ESGAP is an innovative tool initially developed with University College London (UCL) that assesses the state of a territory’s environmental functions and their level of sustainability. For all critical components of natural capital in the territory concerned (air or water quality, pollution, forest resources, fishing resources, etc.), this indicator calculates the difference between their current state and a state that would be sustainable (that is, a state compatible with a sustainable functioning of the processes necessary for the preservation of life, human activities and well-being). This allows the calculation of an “environmental sustainability gap” (ESGAP), which highlights the path to environmental sustainability. This can then serve as a guide for public policies to estimate and preserve the natural state of a given territory.

Standards have been proposed for 16 out of the 22 ESGAP indicators examined in this research project. For 8 indicators, there was not enough solid information to propose a global standard. The study identified 13 datasets available to calculate these indicators globally and provided the source and link to these publicly available databases.

Read the final report: Defining Standards of Good Ecological Condition for Computing the ESGAP in Developing Countries 

The next step to produce a standard of good ecological condition applicable to all countries involves, for indicators with "standards to be defined by experts" (Fairbrass, 2020), to consider who the experts might be and how to engage with them to define a globally applicable standard. This depends on the existence of a globally recognized authority (such as the World Health Organization for pollution or the Food and Agriculture Organization for fisheries), or if the indicator is developed by different teams of scientists or organizations. 

Future work could also focus on examining the state of knowledge and options for setting standards from unconventional sources, such as geospatial data, big earth data, etc. The ARIES project related to the compilation of ecosystem accounts under the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EA) could be an interesting source for this.

Find out more about ESGAP:

• A single indicator of strong sustainability for development: Theoretical basis and practical implementation (2019)
• Monitoring the Environmental Sustainability of Countries through the Strong Environmental Sustainability Index (2022)
• Are We on the Right Path? Measuring Progress towards Environmental Sustainability in European Countries (2022) 

Contact: 

• Oskar Lecuyer, research officer, AFD

AFD has been present in Cambodia since 1993 and supports the country by focusing on two key structural areas: promoting balanced territorial development (access to basic services, water resource management, adaptation to climate change, etc.) on the one hand and supporting the productive sector while respecting environmental and social standards (renewable energies, technical and professional training) on the other.

Produced by AFD's team of country-risk economists, macroeconomic country assessments provide an analysis of development processes in countries in which AFD operates. They also characterize their growth trajectory, and detect economic, social, political and financial vulnerabilities associated with these trajectories. AFD Group is thus in a position to properly measure the challenges and monitor the risks associated with each of its investments.

Emphasis is placed on developing countries, particularly in Africa, for which macroeconomic analyses are rare or infrequent. AFD seeks to complement existing production on the global economic situation, more focused on advanced economies and major emerging countries.

Find out more: Macroeconomic Analyses at AFD

Country-risk analysis is based on a close follow-up over a long period of time and rooted in a fine knowledge of local contexts. Cyclical trends, often highlighted in the news, are always examined in the light of structural trends and of the regional context in which they take place. The aim is to highlight country-specific macroeconomic issues while assessing risks against comparable time- and space-based trajectories.

Country-risk economists place the study of socio-political vulnerabilities, the growth model, the viability of public debt, external balances and the soundness of the financial system at the heart of their assessment, and give specific attention to countries' exposure to climate risks.

For two decades, Cambodia has been experiencing a gradual transformation enabling it to achieve significant economic and social progress and become a lower-middle-income country (LMIC). However, the various exogenous shocks since 2020 have underscored the fragile nature of the progress achieved and highlighted the challenges the country still needs to address to improve its socioeconomic environment, accelerate its economic growth and make it more inclusive, so that it can definitively leave the category of least developed countries.

Our publications on Cambodia's macroeconomic situation: 

• "Cambodia: Significant progress towards sustainable economic growth", in MacroDev Semestrial Panorama n°44, July 2023

Contact: 

• Laura Marie, country-risk economist at AFD

The economic upturn in Côte d'Ivoire since the 2010s has had a limited impact on employment. The transition to employment is often difficult: 35% of 16-35 year olds are far from the labour market (neither employees, nor educated or in training). Moreover, the share of informal employment remains very high (89.4% in 2019). In this context, as a result of population growth, 300,000 young graduates join the job market every year – and an equivalent number leave the education system without a diploma, and without prospects. The mismatch between skills and job offers would be one of the explanations for the difficulties of integrating young people into the labour market.

If these young people carry economic and social development opportunities, they also carry risks if their potential is not used. Population growth makes it imperative to understand changes in labour supply and demand in order to adapt the education and learning system to the needs of the local labour market.

This research project aims to analyze the supply and demand of skills in Bouaké, Daloa, San-Pedro and Korhogo, four secondary cities in Côte d'Ivoire with strong economic potential but that is still little exploited. The city of Abidjan, on which the majority of studies on Côte d'Ivoire focus, is not specifically addressed by this research, but it remains the "reference" case for the analysis of the situations of secondary cities.

Deepening the results of a previous research project on the mismatch between skills and jobs in Côte d'Ivoire, this research project aims to enrich national knowledge on the functioning of the labour market and the nature of bottlenecks that make the transition to employment difficult for young people, as well as to make recommendations aimed at promoting employment and the attractiveness of the four cities.

Additionally, the project includes capacity-building activities specifically targeting young CREMIDE researchers, to support them in the development of their research and to encourage the establishment of scientific partnerships through their participation in international conferences, workshops and training seminars, and through residence in specialized research centres. 

The study will include an in-depth examination of the structure and composition (demography, training and skills) of the local workforce, and of spatial inequalities in skills supply and demand. A gender-specific assessment of the local skills supply will also be carried out, as well as a prospective analysis of the impact of technological developments on the labour market in these cities.

The data used will come from both employment surveys available since 1993 and field surveys conducted during this project. The analysis will incorporate a prospective aspect aimed at understanding jobs in Côte d'Ivoire by 2025 and 2030.

Knowledge will be shared with the research community and made available to national and local decision-makers through workshops, conferences and publications in adapted formats to inform public decision-making.

Contact: 

• Linda Zanfini, research officer at AFD