ABSTRACT
The Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy offers a successful example of the ways in which concrete and reliable data on the human and economic costs of activities that threaten sustainable development can inform and influence the incorporation of environmental concerns into national policy. The purpose of this chapter describes how such data were used in Rwanda. The chapter contains some sections: a summary of the findings of the Poverty and Environment Initiative (PEI) study; and a description of the policy process into which those findings were incorporated. To ensure that environmental concerns were integrated into the country's second poverty reduction strategy paper, participants in the PEI study developed empirical evidence connecting environmental scarcity to poverty, and presented the findings to government ministries and other stakeholders. Through the Rugezi Wetlands and Gishwati Forest case studies, PEI researchers demonstrated that environmental degradation had substantially harmed all levels of the Rwandan economy.
