Environmental Sustainability
Home Page | Compendium of Indicators | Download Data | Learn about Data
Millennium Challenge Corporation - Natural Resource Management Index (NRMI)
Methods | Data Download | Maps | Policies for Improving Performance
Introduction
In May 2005 a consortium led by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, and which included the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP), the University of New Hampshire Water Systems Analysis Group, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Columbia University Tropical Agriculture Program, submitted a proposal to the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in response to the MCC's search for a Natural Resources Management Indicator. In July 2006 MCC selected a revised version of the proposal. This composite index is comprised of four indicators:
- Eco-Region Protection: Developed by CIESIN, this indicator assesses whether a country is protecting at least 10% of all of its biomes (e.g. deserts, forests, grasslands, aquatic, and tundra). It is designed to capture the comprehensiveness of a government’s commitment to habitat preservation and biodiversity protection. World Wildlife Fund provide the underlying biome data, and the United Nations Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center provide the underlying data on protected areas.
- Access to Improved Sanitation: Produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), this indicator measures the percentage of the population with access to facilities that hygienically separate human excreta from human, animal, and insect contact. Facilities such as sewers or septic tanks, poor-flush latrines and simple pit or ventilated improved pit latrines are assumed to be adequate, provided that they are not public.
- Access to Improved Water: Produced by WHO and UNICEF, this indicator measures the percentage of the population with access to at least 20 liters of water per person per day from an “improved” source (household connections, public standpipes, boreholes, protected dug wells, protected springs, and rainwater collection) within one kilometer of the user's dwelling.
- Child Mortality (Ages 1-4): Produced by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the 2006-2008 releases of the NRMI used the number of deaths per 1000 children aged 1 to 4 (mx(1-4)). In 2009, thanks to further guidance from the Population Division, the indicator was changed to the probability of dying between age 1 and 5 (4q1), which is highly correlated with mx(1-4). Because the causes of child mortality among 1–4 year olds are strongly influenced by environmental causes, this indicator is considered to be a useful proxy for underlying environmental conditions.
For the 2011 release, MCC has decided to report both the overall NRMI and to repackage the indicators into two new indices: The Natural Resource Protection Indicator (NRPI), which is solely composed of the eco-region protection indicator, and the Child Health Indicator (CHI), which is an unweighted average of the proximtiy-to-target scores for access to water, access to sanitation, and child mortality. In the future the MCC will be using the two new indicators in place of the NRMI.
The NRMI is computed as a standardized proximity-to-target for each of the four measures. For Access to Adequate Sanitation and Access to Improved Water, the proximity-to-target measure is equal to the reported percentage. For example, if a country has 84% of its population with access to adequate sanitation, it is considered to have a proximity-to-target score of 84. For child mortality, we compute the ratio of the measured probability of dying to the highest observed probability of dying, which is 0.141, and multiply that by 100 to make it comparable to the 0-100 scale used in the other measures. The proximity-to-target measure is this number, which ranges from 0-100, subtracted from 100. For example, a country whose children in the 1-5 age group have a probability of dying of 0.004 would have a proximity-to-target score of 97.2 (0.004/0.1414=0.028; 0.028 x100=2.8; 100-2.8=97.2). For eco-region protection the proximity-to-target score is 10 times the weighted average of the biome protection scores, which are capped at 10% to correspond to the target. For example, a country with an ecoregion protection score of 7 would have a proximity-to-target score of 70. The 10% target was established by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in decision VII/30 as target 1.1 of the 2010 Targets, " At least 10% of each of the world's ecological regions effectively conserved."
The NRMI is the simple average of these four proximity-to-target scores. If a country is missing any of the data points an NRMI is not calculated for it.
Because the Eco-Region Protection indicator requires geographic information system (GIS) processing to develop, we have provided a more detailed methodology here:
- Eco-Region Protection: Methods & Data (PDF, 189KB)
Users wishing to obtain the country level data for biome area and protected area by biome should contact SEDAC User Services.
The data for the Natural Resource Management Index (2011 release) are found in the following spreadsheet. The spreadsheet includes NRMIs for 2006-2009 calculated in a consistent manner, along with a data dictionary. Click on it to open it directly, or right-click for options to save it directly to your computer.
- The NRMI 2011 release (Excel 97 file, 394KB)
Policies for Improving Performance
Links to a number of resources are provided to governments or individuals who wish to learn more about how to improve their performance on the four components of the NRMI.
- Eco-region Protection:
- Access to Improved Sanitation and Improved Water:
- Child Mortality (Ages 1-4):
