Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has been one of the largest actors in the environmental sector, providing approximately $24 billion in grants, and marshaling an additional $107 billion in co-financing for more than 4700 projects in 170 countries. With the explicit goal of supporting international environmental conventions and agreements, a number of these projects have been subjected to evaluation by the GEF Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) to assess their effectiveness in terms of environmental outcomes. However, relatively little research has been conducted to examine the socioeconomic co-benefits that may accrue due to environmental interventions. This is reflective of a broader shortage of impact evaluations of development projects, as the primary environmental impacts of development projects and programs are rarely assessed and quantified conclusively. Recognizing this gap in the literature, and leveraging a unique spatial dataset and methodology, this paper explores the research question: What was the impact of GEF Sustainable Forest Management projects on household income in Uganda between 2009 and 2011?
The full article on Exploring the Socioeconomic Co-benefits by Daniel Runfola, Geeta Batra, Anupam Anand, Audrey Way and Seth Goodman can be accessed online, with this link.