Poor people depend on the environment for their livelihoods and well-being. Improved management of the environment and natural resources contributes direclty to poverty reduction, more sustainable livelihoods and pro-poor growth. To fight poverty, to promote security and to preserve the ecosystems that poor people rely on for their livelihoods, we must place pro-poor economic growth and environmental sustainability at the heart of our economic policies, planning systems and institutions.

To tackle this challenge, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have joined hands and launched the Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI). The PEI is a global UN programme that helps countries to integrate poverty-environment linkages into national and sub-national development planning, from policymaking to budgeting, implementation and monitoring.

With both financial and technical support, UNDP and UNEP assist government decision-makers and a wide range of other stakeholders to manage the environment in a way that improves livelihoods and leads to sustainable growth. The PEI works with key government partners to raise awareness, influence policy making and strengthen the mainstreaming of poverty-environment into budget processes, sector programmes and sub-national planning. The overall aim is to bring about lasting institutional change and to catalyse key actors to increase investment in pro-poor environmental and natural resource management.

The Initiative:

• was formally launched in 2005 and significantly scaled-up in 2007 at the UNEP Governing Council meeting
• works in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean
• operates through a global Facility, four regional teams and the UN country teams
• is funded by the Governments of Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Commission

As of 2010, the PEI is supporting programmes in 22 countries.

[PEI Scale-up proposal] [Annual Progress Report 2008, 2009] [Evaluation: PEI Pilot Programme 2004-2008] [PEI country success stories 2008]

About the Poverty-Environment Facility
In order to coordinate and support the expansion of the PEI, UNDP and UNEP established in May 2007 a joint global Facility composed of staff from the two partner organizations based in Nairobi.

The role of the Facility is to provide strategic direction to the PEI , to coordinate relations with the donors providing funds, to provide technical support and access to knowledge on poverty-environment mainstreaming to the PEI regional and country teams and to provide a hub for a range of partnerships. More...

About Poverty-Environment Mainstreaming
We define poverty-environment mainstreaming as the stepwise process of integrating poverty-environment linkages into development planning for poverty reduction and pro-poor growth at national, sector and local levels. It involves establishing the links between environment and poverty and identifying policies and programmes to bring about better pro-poor environmental management. It is a multi-year, multi-stakeholder effort targeted at influencing policymaking, budgeting, and implementation. It is based on the need to integrate the valuable contribution of environmental management to improved livelihoods, increased economic security and income opportunities for the poor - which is still largely overlooked in development planning and in the wider debate about development priorities. More...

[Handbook for Practitioners 2009]