The purpose of the Urban Environmental Management (UEM) Toolkit is to strengthen urban environmental management decision-making and planning practices. For its implementation, the UEM Toolkit aims to provide decision-makers with mechanisms (i.e., management indicators) to gauge the progress of their urban environmental management activities from a life cycle perspective. The Toolkit will also provide a range of examples of urban environmental management activities that are recognized as Best Management Practices (BMPs), including development policy strategies that integrate poverty reduction, cross-sectoral interests, and local-national-global perspectives. Ultimately, the Toolkit is intended to serve as a contribution for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
A key concept behind the development of this (UEM Indicators) section of the Toolkit is to identify environmental management indicators that go beyond a description of a condition and effectively link to the decision-making process, the latter often being a management element. The BMPs are to be related to the planning decision, to elements of environmental management, and to the indicators themselves.
The process for selecting indicators must consider the need for flexibility, as well as the contribution to an integrated vision. The flexibility is required because, while developing countries may historically lack certain key data, significant advances in urban environmental data collection continue to be made (e.g., through the establishment of urban air quality monitoring networks and the assessment of health impacts resulting from the changes to environmental quality). The set of environmental indicators selected must contribute to the integrated vision of decision-makers. Therefore, the set must contemplate a variety of relationships, including inter-sectoral, multi-media, life cycle, and intergenerational issues of sustainability.
The work towards the preparation of the UEM indicators Toolkit is in progress, and includes the following tasks: (i) Preliminary literature review of urban environmental indicators and BMPs; (ii) Definition of criteria to assess existing indicators; (iii) Preliminary screening of existing indicators; and (iv) Strategy for development of the Toolkit.
Other Indicator Initiatives in the Bank
There are other such initiatives taken in the Bank which include: (i) Towards New Urban Indicators Initiatives; (ii) Indicators for the Urban Water Supply & Sanitation - Benchmarking Water & Sanitation Utilities; (iii) Indicators for Urban Transport Performance
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