 Yes, welcome back. We heard a lot of interesting things about international aid environment and global change. Now we will ask ourselves, how do you achieve environmental goals in developing countries? What is the best way to go? What kind of prices and regulations would be needed and how can international aid play a role in that? We will start with Helle Munch Reveniboy. She is a researcher from the Danish Institute of International Studies. Very welcome. Thank you very much. I'm going to present some of the results from work that we have been doing at Danish Institute for International Studies. Oh, I didn't recognize that one. Together with Stockholm Environment Institute, Rasmus is sitting somewhere down here and we have focused our work on environmental governance, so old-fashioned environmental work that doesn't look particularly at climate change issues. The results of much of the work I have carried, so my arm is still shaking. I've carried a lot of reports from Copenhagen this morning and you're very, very welcome to take a copy with you as you leave this room. The context that I'm speaking to is a context where, as most of you would know, low-income countries also put a very low ecological footprint. Talking about data, we don't have very much consolidated environmental data, but the ecological footprint is one attempt to combine all environmental effects of human activity and give it a single measure. So we take this one to portray to you that low-income countries are not putting a very high, a very heavy footprint in those terms. And it's also common to portray, at least if we look back in history, that environmental issues are not something growing out of developing countries themselves, but rather something that has been imposed, some fear that it is due to competition issues and the rest, but imposed by high-income countries. However, we should not forget that there are environmental costs and many of those environmental costs, both of pollution but also of environmental degradation, are borne by developing countries. Here, a graph that I have borrowed from the World Bank, environmental costs in percent of GDP. And you would find on the high end of the list countries like China, but also a country like Ghana. So it's not so that environmental costs only come later as your economic development continues. The next slide that I'm going to show you is a slide from a march in Nicaragua in 2005. And it tells us something about the environmental costs. I've put it there. It's a dramatic slide. I've put it there to remind us that behind numbers like those we just saw, they're human faces, they're human lives and they're human bodies. And I think we should remember that as we talk on these issues. The next slide is more positive. It shows that, actually, if we look back in time, a lot of things have happened. There's a database collected of environmental legislation, environmental institution building, environmental decrees, environmental court decisions, called ECOLEX. And we have compiled the number of countries that have general environmental legislation. And what you see there is that out of the 103 developing countries in 1986, there were not very many that had environmental legislation. It gained pace after the publication of the Brundtland report in 1986. And then it really gained pace after 1992 with the real conference. This is not to say that environmental legislation is the only way you can perform environmental governance. There are many ways of doing that. But in recognition of new actors emerging in many of these developing economies, dealing with those new actors and also dealing with new substances, chemicals, dealing with new ways of using natural resources, it becomes increasingly important to have that formal or statutory framework for dealing with environmental issues, not least today. Development cooperation has contributed to the picture you just saw. This one is almost similar. It shows the number of aid activities given with a general environmental purpose from 1972, where there were not very many. Maybe they were there, but they were not labeled as such. But at least now we know more about what is inside and we have got this word environment into our development thinking. And you can also see that reflected here. Talking about the fragmentation that we talked about earlier, just looking at the number of aid activities in this general field of environmental regulation, there are more than 68 activities per year per country that they have to report to. So development cooperation has contributed to the picture that you just saw. But of course we can't jump to conclusions just by viewing that there's a correlation between the number of aid activities and the year where you have got your environmental legislation. In order to provide us a bit more detail on those issues, I would like to just give a few highlights from four country and thematic case studies that we've been undertaking, taken in Kenya, in Nicaragua, in Hiché and in Vietnam. And when we look at the aid activities behind these graphs here and see what was the content, how did that correspond to the general legislation, environmental legislation and how did it correspond also to the sector specific or thematic, thematically specific legislation. We can see that development cooperation has in actual fact contributed pre the legislation. So to develop the legislation, it has developed to create the institutions necessary to enforce the legislation and also to take that further into a more decentralized approach within the country. What we also see in these case studies is that we can see a number of challenges that we have ahead of us. So there's a firm ground now in terms of administrative and legal framework, but there's still a lot of challenges in bringing that to work the way it was intended to. One of the first challenges is that environment is a new policy field. Now that is both a challenge, you're challenged by your colleagues in the environment ministry or in the agricultural ministry, why are you now coming to take part of our issues to deal with? Why is development assistance going to you and not to us, et cetera? But it's also an opportunity. What people living in many of these countries see is that now we have a new infrastructure, now we have a new policy, new sets of instruments, and we can use those to bring up issues that we haven't been able to bring up with the traditional ministry of agriculture. That came out in the case study that we did in Kenya and it came out also in some of the research that we've been doing in Nicaragua. We have the legislative and administrative framework in place, but often the enforcement capacity is not existent, or it's very, very low. This is not rocket science. There's a limit to how much you can expect to do with just one or two technical professionals in the field of enforcing these environmental laws. There's a limit to how much you can expect them to do if they need to be accompanied by the police officer next door, but the police officer is not interested in going with them to do what they're supposed to do. In Nicaragua it seems like within a normal district there would be a maximum of five people who have any kind of professional education, not even academics, in all fields. In Denmark the academics in an average district would be at a number of more than 100 and usually 160. So there's a limit to how much you can do if you don't have the people on the ground to do what is needed. That is a challenge. Some of the environmental issues are never raised, they're never voiced, not by the governments when they're negotiating with donor agencies and not by the donor agencies when they're discussing environmental issues and how they can cooperate. One case in point is this picture that you probably don't see very well, but we did a study on uranium mining in Niger. Niger is one of the poorest countries on this planet. It's also a country that we often, what we hear about it is that there's a lot of deforestation, there's desertification, etc, etc. We don't hear that it's the fourth largest exporter of uranium. That issue is not brought into the discussions when development aid is negotiated even though the legislation is in place, but there's not any enforcement capacity to make it work and to do the testing and create the data that is needed to find out whether actually a large part of the population is affected and also a large part of the livestock is affected by uranium. It's a political economy that sometimes makes us blind. And then another point relates to the international environmental legislative conventions. It's increasingly important to think that development assistance and its relative importance is declining. It's the seventh part of what it was in relative terms to international finance now than what it was 20 years ago. And that trend is probably going to continue. If we want to have a platform that is legitimate where we can negotiate and discuss environmental issues that are not only relevant locally but also internationally, we need these conventions to create that legitimate and open space where countries can be put to respond to their actions, where people can make claims. If their national government is not willing to listen, they can take resort in international conventions. And the pesticide case from Nicaragua is a case in point where there is an international legislation but it's not strong enough, it's not precise enough, there's not enough data and there's sometimes also enough political will to make it include the issues that are really important to have included. We need to work to change that. So the recommendations from this very brief presentation is to support and to strengthen the enforcement capacity at the district level, at the local level, whatever is appropriate in the individual country, but also recognize that environment is not just something that takes place within the environmental ministry, it's something that requires integration horizontally with police officers, with lawyers, with researchers, with civil society activists and the rest of it. So we have to think of environmental issues and environmental governance moving it out from where it has been to where it actually belongs. And in continuation of that one of the ways that development cooperation in the future can contribute to make strong environmental governance in respect of all the laws and rights and principles is to strengthen that claim making capacity of citizens through support for the authorities that I just talked about and also through support for the civil society organizations. And then as a last bit, to really work to develop the international environmental conventions, it is a great victory that we have so many conventions. Many people will know that it takes a lot of effort to report to all of these conventions, but they're very important as this legitimate space. We need as an international society to make sure that what is thought of as a legal framework enabling us to handle these very complex issues is also maintained like that and is not undermined and becoming software guidelines because there are not enough targets and sufficiently clear targets and because we are not willing to provide the multilateral assistance to make it possible to actually have the monitoring that is needed to make them work. So these are the words from a district officer, environmental officer in a district in Nicaragua, where he says, without the international support, being asked whether this is an agenda imposed by development organizations, he says, without the international support, we would never have been able to address the environmental problems we have in my district. So I think we should continue that work and not let this guy work alone. Thank you.