Environmental Policy Assessment Decision Support for the Inter-American Development Bank

Dennis Grossman, Conservation Biology Institute, denny@consbio.org (Presenter)
James Strittholt, Conservation Biology Institute, stritt@consbio.org

Multi-lateral development banks must review all proposed development projects according to their environmental and social safeguard policies. Over the past three years, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has adopted customized decision support technology to help them implement these policies. A consortium of environmental NGO’s (Conservation International, Bird Life International, NatureServe, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) collaborated to provide datasets that represent Critical Natural Habitat and Natural Habitat across Latin America to IDB. The Conservation Biology Institute created a special application of a web-based information sharing and applications technology, Data Basin (www.databasin.org), to support IDB project review using this information. IDB is currently using this decision support tool, the IDB-DSS, to carry out environmental policy review of proposed development projects.

The IDB-DSS helps IDB to quickly assess and categorize all proposed development projects as A, B or C relative to Critical Natural Habitat (CNH) and Natural Habitat (NH). IDB policy mandates different responses for A Projects (high probability of significant impact to CNH), B Projects (high probability of significant impact to NH), and C Projects (low probability of impact to CNH or NH). The new IDB-DSS integrates relevant datasets on Protected Areas, ecosystems and species to represent these IDB policy categories of CNH and NH. It allows the user to represent a proposed project and associated area of impact on a map, to complete an environment assessment of the project against these policy layers, and then generate a report of impact probability.

IDB is interested to advance their ability to evaluate proposed development projects through the inclusion of additional datasets and tools in this decision support system. They specifically are interested in advancing their ability to evaluate a) environmental services (primarily carbon and water), b) impact assessments (indirect and cumulative), and c) impact mitigation and compensation relative to proposed projects.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Science in Support of Decision Making   (Wed 10:00 AM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Related Activity

Poster Location ID: 309