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Indicators are an important tool for designing and evaluating poverty reduction strategies, projects, and outcomes. They are useful for monitoring changes and trends over time, they provide a means for comparing progress across different countries and are needed for evaluating the results of projects. Without indicators, well-developed strategies and programs can be rendered meaningless. Accordingly, this paper seeks to identify different ways in which indicators can be used to understand poverty-environment interactions and to monitor poverty reduction that results from environmental changes.

Indicators can be used to monitor change at different scales, for different purposes and in a number of different ways. At the national (or sub-national) level, poverty-environment trends can be monitored over time and across geo-political categories. An example of a relatively simple but important individual indicator at the national level is “population with access to safe water.” Data for this indicator is collected globally and can be used to compare different countries or provinces over several different years. If countries are willing to collect more detailed data, the OECD (1994) designed Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model can be used to assess change. This model seeks to identify a cluster of indicators for each environmental problem that are indicative of where the pressure on the environment comes from, what the state or general condition of the environmental good is, and what society’s response has been or needs to be to alleviate pressure.