When the world is in crisis, evaluation can provide answers. New approaches and criteria to promoting climate and ecosystems health and meaningful equity.

Increasingly, climate and ecological crises are gaining greater recognition across many segments of society as challenges that need to be addressed with urgency. On a near daily basis, stories of extreme weather events, melting ice caps, and the breaching of planetary tipping points circulate in news media. Governments across the globe have committed to transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels and to reduce carbon emissions. Yet the level of action required to minimise the negative consequences of biodiversity loss, pollution, and ecosystems degradation is insufficient to meet key targets. To avoid, mitigate and address these crises, decision-making must be informed by evaluations that explore the actual and likely environmental consequences of all programs, projects, policies, and strategies, and not only those deemed environmental impact studies.

How do evaluators effectively address ecosystems health and just transition in evaluations? How can evaluations be designed to support decision-making that promotes environmental sustainability and regeneration? Evaluation criteria and setting evaluation questions are key processes to support this effort.

In this session, participants will be exposed to multiple approaches for considering climate and ecosystems health and just transition in evaluations. The session will be a combination of presentation and practical engagement. Andy Rowe from Footprint Evaluation will introduce participants to the Footprint Evaluation approach and, with Tim Lubanga of the Ugandan Office of the Prime Minister, will share how it was used to frame Tim Lubanga questions and guide the analysis and recommendations of a mid-term evaluation of a national strategy for private sector development. Ian Goldman and Jennifer Norins from SAMEA (South Africa Monitoring and Evaluation Association) will introduce participants to two evaluation criteria and guidelines co-developed during the 2021 evaluation hackathon on climate and ecosystems health and transformative equity and how these can be applied to evaluations, using the learnings of pilots conducted in South Africa.

Following the discussion on these two approaches, participants will be presented with group work to develop a set of evaluation questions for a case evaluation to take account of ecosystems health and just transition. By the end of the session, it is hoped that participants will have a better grasp of how to more explicitly consider environmental sustainability in and through evaluations.