Environment and Natural Resource Management
The quality of community life and the ability of communities depends on the relationship of ecological and social systems. The links between poverty and the environment are bidirectional: environmental degradation, whether occurring naturally or as a result of human interventions threatens the livelihoods of the rural poor and most of them depend directly on agriculture, livestock, poultry, horticulture and orchard management to earn their living. Basic nutritional needs cannot be met when crop yields are reduced because of poor soil quality. Home-based enterprises requiring natural resources are abandoned due to non-availability and unaffordability of these resources.
Similarly, poverty has negative environmental effects when the poor chooses unsustainable practices i.e. cutting down trees and polluting water supplies. Whatever the cause of poverty is, environmental degradation affects the poor and vulnerable first due to lack of adequate socioeconomic resources.
This environmental degradation has resulted in emergence of new class of poor whose likelihood solely depends on natural recourses.
ENRM sector continues to foster productive linkages of COs with the line departments for the purpose taking benefits from their services. It has established linkages of COs with the agriculture extension department, soil conservation, livestock and poultry, forest and farm management developments.
Environmental & Social Management Framework (ESMF)
To counter the environmental and social consequences “Environment & Social Management Framework” (ESMF) has been prepared to set out the environmental assessment procedures required by PPAF and its Partners Organisations to assess the environmental consequences of PPAF interventions.
Following are the objectives of ESMF:
- Prevent execution of interventions with significant individual or cumulative negative environmental and social impacts;
- Minimize potential individual and cumulative negative impacts by incorporating mitigations at the design stage and implementing mitigations at the implementation stage of the interventions;
- Enhance the positive impacts of interventions;
- Protect environmentally sensitive areas
- Enable PPAF and POs to monitor the implementation of ESMF on the basis of intervention specific structured environmental assessment formats