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Session Notes Human Development in the : Transformations to Expand Human Freedoms in Balance with the Planet Virtual Regional Consultation for and CIS on the 2020 Human Development Report

Presentation Pedro Conceição, Director, Human Development Report Office, UNDP Panelists

Panelists Prof. Jaya Krishnakumar, Full Professor of Econometrics, University of Geneva Dr. Bina Desai, Head of Department, Policy and Research, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Geneva Dr. Rosie Day, Senior Lecturer in Environment and Society, School of , Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham

Moderated by Mirjana Spoljaric Egger Assistant Secretary-General of the ; Assistant Administrator of UNDP and Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS

Introductory Presentation – Pedro Conceição

• There are three questions with which we are struggling in this report: o What does a Human Development narrative look like in the Anthropocene? o What are the implications for action of a potentially new Human Development narrative? o What are the implications for metrics? • What does the Human Development narrative look like in the Anthropocene? o The HD concept is fairly simple, but powerful. It is based on the idea that people are the ultimate ends of development, and that we should focus on these ends, not on means such as income, to both assess and as an evaluative framework for policies. o Development is then seen as a process of expanding freedoms to enable people to be and do what they have reason to value. This is called capabilities in Human Development literature. o From the first report 30 years ago, aspects related to and the environment have made their way to the report in different ways. E.g: the link between environmental degradation and in developing countries and in rich countries. HD and links to water and have also been developed. o However, now we have something novelty. We confront the Anthropocene. The core of the concept is that human activity is interacting with the planet in ways which are disrupting planetary processes at a very fundamental level. Examples of this include climate change, , and loss. o This reality intersects with existing inequalities in Human Development, described in the 2019 HDR. Many of these interactions with the planet may be deepening or widening these

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inequalities. For instance, the 2019 report already highlighted how climate change can exacerbate inequalities and have an asymmetric impact on the most vulnerable and deprived. o Looking at the Anthropocene gives us an opportunity to go deeper and, for instance, look at how Human Rights violations sometimes are associated with of natural . This is well documented in the seafood supply chain, where extraction in is tied to human trafficking and slave labor. o New ethical questions are also raised by the Anthropocene. With regards to biodiversity, mass have happened from natural causes in the past. But nowadays, we’re potentially facing a 6th mass attributed to human activity. o The debate is often framed in terms of looking at nature and the planet as a constraint. Here’s where the HD narrative could open a new framing. The focus is the expansion of human freedoms, and what the new narrative calls for is a deeper understanding of the interdependence between people and nature and between societies and . • What are the implications for action of a potentially new Human Development narrative? o Our premise is that this HD approach narrative opens up space for a wider range of arenas for public deliberation and policy. o Market incentives play a role as long as the allocation of resources in our economy is linked to formal markets, so we certainly need to address the pricing of . o Technology is key not just in terms of specific solutions that could contribute to, for example, decarbonization, but more broadly in terms of how the digital economy offers a chance for us to interact in richer and more creative ways. o Shifting values and social norms can also be seen within the action scope of enlarging human freedoms in balance with the planet. Social movements, for example, have been able to change social norms throughout history. o Nature should not be looked at as a constraint or limitation, but rather as a source of opportunities to address some of the challenges we confront in the Anthropocene. • What are the implications for metrics? o We have different indices to measure different dimensions of Human Development. The question we confront is whether it’s possible to combine, in a single indicator, something that speaks to current capabilities and something that speaks to the sustainability of future capabilities. o Another challenge we confront is the availability of data. Nature is composed of complex interacting systems and it’s difficult to find indicators that describe this complexity as well as the pressures we are putting on nature and the ways in which we’re interacting with it.

Mirjana Spoljaric • 30 years ago, we didn’t have the experience of climate change, of the digital transformation, and of the accelerating technological advancement we have today. We have a true opportunity to introduce a paradigm shift into our work.

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Panelists’ Presentations

Dr. Rosie Day

• Our earth system is very important in sustaining our capabilities. Earth’s resources are implicated in practically all of our capabilities and the realization of them. But, as we know, we’re putting way too much stress on the earth system. Most obviously, there is climate change. But there’s also depletion, , loss of biodiversity, and many other disruptions. • The challenge is to reverse some of these damages without going back on Human Development or impeding future progress. Here, it’s important to think about inequalities. We’re facing overuse of sinks and resources, both really important for supporting our capabilities, and in Europe we have a very rich span of capabilities. • We need to question the extent of our capabilities and think more in terms of sufficiency. This means thinking about overall capability sets, but also about the amount of any given capability that we may have. Example of mobility: it is an important capability, but we can’t expect it to be an unlimited capability. Having parcels delivered is an important capability for us now, but we shouldn’t expect to be able to buy online and get the parcel the next day. • We have to think about alternative ways in which we can support multidimensional well-being which are not so resource intensive. We must look at how we can support our health, our recreation, our security, etc. in ways that don’t have such a big impact on the earth systems. Sustainable freedom concept. • On horizontal inequalities, there’s inequality in the of resources (causes) and inequality on the impacts of degradation of earth systems on people (effects). Both are intertwined. Examples: heat waves, which have become more common in recent years, have bigger impacts on older people, people in poor quality who may not be able to get out of the heat, people working outdoors or on workplaces that are not well managed. Flooding events have bigger impacts on people who are socioeconomically vulnerable, people who lack support networks, people who aren’t able to get insurance, people with disabilities, women, and minorities. Basically, they exacerbate a lot of existing vulnerabilities. • Fossil fuels exacerbate climate change but also create problems with . This has a lot of health impacts and affect other capabilities as well. With regards to energy, even in the comparatively privileged Europe there are people with constrained energy access. 11% of people in the UK suffer . A part of the 35,000 to 55,000 excess deaths in winter could be explained due to fuel poverty. • We mostly think of energy poverty as affecting people’s ability to keep warm, but if looked at from a capabilities approach it becomes apparent that it has multidimensional effects. Living in energy poverty has a detrimental effect on relationships, social respect, on , and others. In the UK energy poverty is higher amongst the unemployed, single parents, and ethnic minorities. • The aim is to ensure everyone has a decent set of capabilities while also reducing overconsumption of resources and impacts on earth systems. We need to consider capability ceilings and sufficiency as well as supporting capabilities that are less resource intensive. Some interesting examples in Europe: Poor quality housing: Approaches like grants for insulation of and refurbishment have been successful where governments have been able to afford them. Regulation of rented housing

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and energy efficiency are also important. : a faster transition to RE is important, Europe had been doing well but now isn’t doing a lot to support small scale of energy that may be done by households or communities. • is a good example of where we might need to think about sufficiency. We can think of economic instruments like higher taxes on additional cars, or higher taxes on larger vehicles (a problem in Europe now), but we can also think of how to support our capability with less reliance on personal vehicles and potentially less reliance on mobility. Investment on good quality is important, it needs to be affordable, reliable, and attractive. We also need to get more for electric vehicles. We need to be designing our better for walking and cycling and taking more measures to keep cars away from vulnerable areas like schools, hospitals, older people communities, and basically from vulnerability. • Substitutes to mobility are also important. In our current situation digital methods are at the forefront of this, but we need to be aware about the energy use implications of digitalization (energy use for data is starting to outstrip energy use for aviation) and also about the critical energy demand for devices and demand for products like cobalt and the Human Rights implications of this. Digital exclusion is also an issue, we need to keep in mind the people who can’t or don’t wish to connect very well. • Investment in green spaces and places that support urban biodiversity. A danger is that it’s easy to disinvest in these areas for local authorities, but the importance of these spaces for and community programs is key.

Dr. Bina Desai

• Displacement, at the scale that we’re seeing, is a fault line of development pathways. So, where we see it, we see that our development pathways are not enabling well-being and capabilities. Instead they are generating more inequalities and more pressure on natural resources and ecosystems. • In 2019 we saw the highest numbers of internally displaced people ever recorded, throughout the year there were more than 33 million people internally displaced due to conflict and disasters. By the end of the year, there were more than 50 million people living in internal displacement, some having been displaced for years and even decades. • The main issue is that the underlying drivers of displacement are not sufficiently addressed. Triggers are the events that cause people to flee in that moment, but there are structural underlying drivers that build-up to create this situation. Example Horn of : the severe locust invasion going on is a perfect storm of different physical and also social drivers and triggers. Since 2016 communities have been facing severe droughts interspaced with annual severe floods that washed away crops and eroded grazing lands. This has severely affected , communal stability, and now even political stability (elections delayed, renewed tensions and conflict). Now adding the current pandemic, it has become apparent how preexisting vulnerabilities and the of human capabilities and has exposed people. Millions have fled across those countries in the last two months alone. On top of things, the recent rainy season has facilitated the current locust invasion, which is significantly renewing the food security threat, plus the immediate impact on income. Beyond this, some of the core components of Human Development such as education and access to basic health services are at risk, and people may need to find new land which could

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potentially reignite tensions over land and natural resources. All of these factors together are creating a major humanitarian and human development crisis. Seeing how we can reflect some of these connections through the metrics would be key. • IDMC has created a displacement risk model that provides metrics of expected annual displacement over a long period of time, also probable maximum displacement numbers within certain hazard contexts. This is to be able to shift the debate towards not just reacting to humanitarian crisis but towards engaging with development actors and making a case for long-term investment. • We have worked with the HDI to show the correlation between Human Development and displacement risk, which is clearly there. And we have also tried to look at it in the context of and human capabilities, moving the resilience and security questions beyond the national context and towards looking at communities and societies as a whole. • Numbers alone do not provide the right incentives for action regarding the actual causes of displacement, they cannot drive development . They also do not take into account what countries may already be doing to address displacement in areas such as accommodation, food, education, health, resilience building, etc. So, we created the Global Internal Displacement Index that measures the policies and capacities of countries to address displacement on the one hand, and the scales, severity and impacts of displacement on the other. It also looks at the socioeconomic context using the HDI, the environmental context (with Environmental Performance Index), and the stability context in which displacement is found. This allows us to 1. show that displacement is not the product of an external shock, but it’s actually very much driven by the political and social choices we make as societies and countries and 2. to generate incentives for action, including by showcasing what countries are already doing. • The HDI, by moving beyond income, pushed for action and investment in education and health. I really hope the work with this report and beyond will push us beyond this anthropocentric view of wellbeing and create incentives for a more holistic view and investment for environmental sustainability.

Prof. Jaya Krishnakumar

• UNDP - HDRO paradigm shift towards Human Development some 30 years ago and making the effort to keep it at the forefront of development has been crucial. HDI as a measure of the concept of wellbeing was another step forward as it provided policy makers with a simple and credible alternative to income per capita as a welfare indicator. It also created incentives for countries to move up in the ranking. Now, it may be time for some fundamental changes or additions. • 1st recommendation: to have an index with a wider scope in order to bring the measurement closer to the multidimensional concept that it is supposed to represent. In particular, add two dimensions: o 1. Inequality: addressing the question of individual versus collective progress. It brings in the question of , which should be constitutive of development. It would be a dimension by itself, incorporating various indices on various types of inequalities including incomes, outcomes, opportunities, access to resources, etc. It should measure vertical and horizontal inequalities. o 2. Environment: are we progressing at the expense of nature? Economists may argue that the environment could be taken as a constraint, but this goes against the concept of

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capabilities and human development for which living in is fundamental. Nature should be a part of wellbeing, not just a tool of wellbeing. Suggestion: propose an extended-HDI with the added dimensions of equality/justice and environmental quality. • 2nd recommendation: Be bold and launch a planetary wellbeing index or a planetary development index which combines multiple dimensions of human as well as nature wellbeing. Exactly in the same way as HDI was proposed 30 years ago. o Moving towards a planet-centred development concept, of course including humans. Putting human wellbeing at an equal footing with nature wellbeing. The key question then becomes, can human and nature wellbeing be enhanced simultaneously? Or, even beyond, can we turn our activities towards the generation or re-generation of nature? o Planetary wellbeing would be a combination of human wellbeing + nature wellbeing, each with multiple dimensions. o This concept lends itself very well to modelling exercises allowing for a deeper understanding of the interdependence between humankind and nature as well as a more complete policy impact analysis.

• 3rd suggestion: include more ‘flow’ and quality indicators in the existing dimensions. o Education – include more ‘flow’ indicators like high school graduates per year, professional graduates like engineers, IT graduates, vocational graduates, degree of IT penetration in society etc. o Health – add indicators that reflect health ‘quality’ in terms of physical and mental illnesses in general, and especially in childhood as well as old age. Examples: infant mortality, child morbidity, prevalence of major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, etc., indicators of old-age health issues like percentage of old-age people suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc.

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o The flow indicators can help showcase short-term change and avoid frustration. • 4th suggestion: Propose a model-based index, not as an alternative to HDI which has become the HDRO ‘brand’, but in domains such as empowerment where the methodology is very appropriate. o It is now possible to go beyond averages and take correlations into account. If we have highly correlated indicators within the same dimension, this means that they are capturing more or less a similar aspect. If we combine them, it’s possible that we could be giving more importance to some aspects than others. o Use of models and big data analytics: Using statistical and econometric models, such as Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Models, one would extract the underlying commonality among them. In addition, these methods can tackle many dimensions and big data. • 5th suggestion: Construct elegant, useful and interactive visualisations of our flagship indices. o In addition to presenting the indices in the form of tables, the idea is to present a visual (e.g. a world map) which when pointed to a country, will not only show its HDI value but also its components and the various indicators within the dimensions. o At the same time, for each country, one should also be able to zoom in, and go from the national level to the regional, and ‘village’ levels (whenever values are available), even up to an individual level. Finally, make it interactive to see what happens when certain parameters are changed.

Discussion

Q1: How would we design an indicator on ? (Carolina Rivera)

Prof. Jaya Krishnakumar: pick-up a few key domains (like pollution, biodiversity, climate change, etc.) and look at the indicators that exist, there are some already available, e.g. Yale, Columbia, , WWF, etc. Then see what countries are performing better in terms of addressing environmental challenges, and where there is inefficiency in the use of resources. If one looks at the HDI and the environmental index on the other side, the picture would indicate that in order for low human development countries to reach the middle and high development countries’ HDI value, we would need the capacity of many planet earths at the current level and circumstances of .

Q2: On the idea of sufficiency, I think in a way this goes back to the origin of the which was meant to capture what at the time was considered to be basic needs. So, the essence. One of the arguments we make in our last report is that it’s important to look also at what may be the considered the new necessities of the 21st century, and that calls for a more abounded way of looking at capabilities. Not looking only at floors but also at this idea that Human Development is about this idea of expanding freedoms. In that expansion of freedom, there is scope to define what are the freedoms that matter. What’s your reflection (to Rosie) on how we can reconcile these two notions? Are they contradictory? Are they one and the same? How may one define sufficiency? (Pedro Conceiçao)

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Dr. Rosie Day: I think these two ideas are not incompatible. We need to be looking beyond the basic indicators and we should be able to support a wider capability set, and the capabilities which are needed in the world today are in many cases beyond the basic set of capabilities that the original index measured. At the same time, we can’t have unlimited capabilities. Sufficiency is both in terms of which capabilities we ought to focus on supporting, and also with some capabilities it is about the amount. How to do that is the difficult question, and it’s up for debate. This can only be solved through democratic means. Essentially, it’s a societal question about our values and how we want to live.

Q3: Is it helpful for a policy maker to have an indicator that’s about current wellbeing or one that is more about future wellbeing? Is there advantage in combining the two? Is there a tension? (Pedro Conceiçao)

Prof. Jaya Krishnakumar: if the flow improves systematically and consistently over time, you end up with a good stock. If you take education, for example, and measure the years of education on an adult , that indicator is not going to change for a long time. Whereas if you take enrollment, that’s going to change from year to year. Then, as enrollment improves, the average years of education will improve. I think If you have flow indicators that change more quickly and improve them over time, you are going to have a good stock. Just having stock indicators doesn’t show the complete picture because we don’t see things which are changing fast.

Q4: What can be said on the difficulty to collect quality data when trying to add indicators? (Mirjana Spoljaric)

Prof. Jaya Krishnakumar: the availability of data will be a problem. That’s the tradeoff. Keeping as many countries as possible and also trying to get as many indicators as possible. I do believe that many indicators are now available. People have been collecting data on sustainability and environmental degradation. WHO, UNICEF, and many others, have data we could borrow. If the choice is between having fewer countries and more indicators, or vice versa, I would choose to keep more countries. However, the challenge is to have as many as possible of both.

Q5: In this particular moment, and with the compound crisis that we have, how do you see the role of the international community and what are the efforts that should be strengthened at this moment? What is the emphasis that this report should be making at the international level? (Heriberto Tapia)

Dr. Bina Desai: There’s a key policy gap that is more a participation gap at the global level. The countries that are most affected by internal displacement are not at the table most of the time, so there is the issue that we don’t have the perspectives of a lot of countries and we haven’t had them for the last two decades. This is now changing as some countries are taking the lead. On the evidence side, what’s missing is an understanding of what the drivers and impacts are of displacement and how they relate to issues like human development. What’s also missing from this is the incentive to integrate internal displacement into national development planning. More solid data and analysis on the economic impacts of displacement, but also displacement risks and contexts, would contribute to showing the link and making the case for investing in

8 development and in addressing displacement. This would contribute to social and human wellbeing. From this, I support including more flow indicators because it would bring a better representation of the dynamism of human development.

Q6: What would be the of indicators? What you’re proposing would be a great but there’s always this discussion between a single index and dashboards How many composite indexes should there be? In terms of data, should we stick to countries or move to different aggregations, be them global or local? (Heriberto Tapia)

Prof. Jaya Krishnakumar: On the debate on one index versus the dashboards, I think both can be done. I think some key dimensions, I would put all indicators on a dashboard because it is important to see how each one is evolving. This is an important question in terms of what the expected levels for environmental wellbeing are. There is no natural frontier we can think of when we think of nature wellbeing so why should it be a political frontier? But because decisions are made at a country level, I think that the country level would be the best level to measure. There are natural units of operation, like taking natural entities like ecosystems, lakes, glaciers, etc. but the political decisions are taken at the country level.

Ben Slay: Now there are the dashboards, which are reported for environmental indicators as well. These dashboards use data that can address SDG indicators and therefore have the ability to bring the human development indicators and data together with the and SDG indicators and data. The more that we, as UNDP, can do to bring sustainable development and human development narratives and indicators together, the better. One possibility is expanding these dashboards to look at other SDG indicators and targets. Another approach is to repeat what was done with the inequality adjusted HDI and have a sustainability adjusted HDI. To somehow have sustainability metrics imposed on the components of the HDI or add additional sustainability components. A third approach is to take someone else’s sustainability indicators and include that. Reference was made to the Environmental Sustainability Index, that could be a good solution. Finally, I would simply like to point out that as these issues play out in the HQ context, they also have relevance in the country context. There have been attempts by national offices to introduce in their own national reporting, sustainability indicators and sustainability adjusted HDI. In the future, it would be possible to bring out the voices of people in the country offices who have done this with their own country data and see what their lessons and their experiences have been.

Elena Danilova-Cross: This report is really special because of the shift in the paradigm. I think this shift is happening in line with the pandemic, as it is testing our personal responsibility and behavioral patterns. I think we can emphasize that the people are agents of change. We can no longer put the responsibility on others for climate change and other economic crises. How we behave and how he treat nature is in our power. What is really coming apparent for us is that access to universal health is disrupted. We need to promote sustainable food systems because we realize that food supplies are not sustainable and weak. For this region we see that unhealthy diets and physical sedentarism are the prime aggravators of death cases of COVID-19.

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We need to formalize jobs; we understand now that a gray economy and informal jobs are undermining the social protection systems. We also need to green our employment and reform the tax collection systems, including the environmental fiscal reforms. For example, dirty fuels like coal which people use in their households, need to be changed to cleaner fuels like gas and electricity, plus technology like renewable energy. We also need to look at integrated management.

Final comments

Dr. Rosie Day: The current context is very interesting to launch a report like this because it has laid bare a lot of inequalities and vulnerabilities, many of which connect to our abuse of nature. I think it has also made a lot of people reflect on our real needs and on alternatives to end these levels of consumption. One positive outcome is people have realized how able we are to embrace change. We actually can change our lives considerably, and I think conversations on sufficiency and other concepts I mentioned are more possible now than they were before.

Dr. Bina Desai: The sufficiency concept made me think about the COVID response and the blueprint that has been implemented in terms of lockdowns and other restrictive measures, without warning and very quickly. In many of these countries, measures were taken following the examples of other countries without much regard for the local context. I think with the HDI it is possible to have, rather than a blanket approach, some basic indicators across all countries but also a menu of options for countries that are able to report on other kinds of indicators. It would allow countries to have more layers of information and it would allow the HDI to generate a fuller picture where it’s possible, without compromising its global reach.

Prof. Jaya Krishnakumar: I think Ben’s point on connecting human development data to SDG data is an important point. But I wouldn’t go to the extent of linking the hundreds of indicators in all 17 goals. I would choose some key indicators that we think appropriate to integrate in the HDI. Finally, I’m not a big fan of adjusting indexes to inequality or sustainability, I think they should come into the indexes and not just be adjustments.

Pedro Conceição: We take the message that we need to be ambitious, innovate and push the envelope and we will do so, but also with humility. Understanding that this report will not provide all the answers but hopefully it will open a new era in Human Development reports and debates more broadly that ultimately change our values. We know from sociologists that the importance that we give to things in terms of our self- worth has changed throughout history. It was virtue in classical times, it became power in medieval and renaissance times, now it’s money. There’s no reason why our society, through a process of deliberation and democracy, cannot reach a stage in which our values change to make us able to expand freedoms while living in balance with the planet.

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