Natural Resource Protection Indicator (NRPI) and Child Health Indicator (CHI), Preliminary 2024 Release

Overview
Since 2006, CIESIN has been calculating two metrics that are used as criteria for country selection for funding from the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC): a Natural Resource Protection Indicator (NRPI) and a Child Health Indicator (CHI). These are used in the MCC country scorecards. Since 2020 the CHI has also been used by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for its Country Roadmap. This is calculated by CIESIN and disseminated by SEDAC. In 2022, the NRPI was changed from a measure of protected areas coverage to a measure derived from multiple indicators of the most recent release of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which is calculated directly by the MCC from the EPI component parts. The indicators are defined as follows:

  1. The Natural Resource Protection Indicator is derived from four components of the 2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which is produced by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and CIESIN (EPI web site; data access). The four components are: Biodiversity and Habitat, Ecosystem Services, Fisheries, and Agriculture. The Biodiversity and Habitat component measures the share of terrestrial and marine areas that are protected, as well as the protection of rare species and their habitats. The Forest component measures forest and forest landscape loss, tree cover loss and change in tree cover, and forest landscape integrity. The Agriculture component measures the sustainable use of nitrogen, phosphorus and pesticides in farming, as well as relative crop yields. The Fisheries component measures the sustainability of fishing practices, including the share of fish caught from overfished populations, the use of harmful fishing practices such as trawling and a marine trophic index.
  2. The Child Health Indicator is comprised of three underlying indicators:
    • Access to At Least Basic Sanitation. Produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), access to at least basic sanitation includes the population using improved sanitation methods that are not shared. Improved sanitation methods comprise flush or pour-flush to piped sewer system, septic tank, or pit latrine; ventilated improved pit (VIP) latrine; pit latrine with slab; or composting toilet.
    • Access to At Least Basic Water. Produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), access to at least basic water includes the population using improved drinking water sources which require less than 30 minutes for collection. Improved drinking water sources comprise piped water into dwelling, yard or plot; public tap or standpipe; tubewell or borehole; protected spring; protected dug well; or rainwater collection.
    • Child Mortality (Ages 1–4 – i.e., from age of 1 to exact age 5). Produced by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, this indicator represents the child mortality rate in the age group 1–4 (per 1000 children aged 1). 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.
Download

The 2024 NRPI and CHI data are available in an Excel Workbook.

Prior releases of the NRPI/CHI are available via the NASA Earthdata Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC).

Methods

All indicators are computed as a standardized proximity-to-target ranging from 0 (worst performance) to 100 (at target or best performance).

The Child Health Indicator is calculated as follows. For Access to At Least Basic Sanitation and Access to At Least Basic 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 child mortality rate in the age group 1-4 (per 1000 children aged 1) in a given country to the highest child mortality rate in that age group in each year. To calculate the child mortality proximity-to-target score, it is necessary to have a benchmark for the highest reported child mortality as a worst performance lower bound. In the time series data reported by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) between 2010 and 2022, Niger had the highest reported child mortality rate between ages 1 and 4, at 74.60401 per 1,000 population aged 1. The formula for calculation is as follows: 100 - ((country value) / 74.60401) * 100). For example, a country whose whose child mortality rate is 43.3 per 1000 would have a proximity-to-target score of 41.96022 (or 100 - ((43.3/74.60401) * 100)). The time series for water and sanitation run through 2022.

For Natural Resource Protection, the four components of the 2024 Environmental Performance Index that are used in the MCC scorecards include Biodiversity and Habitat, Forest, Fisheries, and Agriculture. MCC combines these four components using EPI’s weighting methodology. EPI assigns each component a specific weight. To compute the overall score, MCC multiplies the score for each component by the weight for that component, adds them together, and divides by the total weight. If a country is missing data for a particular indicator, the weight for that indicator is not included in the numerator and denominator of the fraction. This is most common in landlocked countries which have no fisheries scores.

MCC’s Natural Resource Protection Indicator = [(Agriculture Score x Agriculture Weight) + (Fisheries Score x Fisheries Weight) + (Biodiversity and Habitat Score x Biodiversity and Habitat Weight) + (Forest x Forest Weight)] ÷ [Agriculture Weight + Fisheries Weight + Biodiversity and Habitat Weight + Forest Weight]

For example, using data from the 2024 EPI, the weights for these components would be as follows: Agriculture: 0.03, Fisheries: 0.02, Foret: 0.05, and Biodiversity and Habitat: 0.25. This means that a country with all four areas measured, such as Cameroon in 2024 would have their score calculated as follows. Cameroon had the following component scores: Agriculture: 49.3, Fisheries: 81.6, Forest: 58.4, and Biodiversity and Habitat: 45.2. The numerator for this calculation is the weighted sum of the four scores i.e. (49.3 x 0.03) + ( 81.6 x 0.02) + (58.4 x 0.05) + (45.2 x 0.25) = 18.37. The denominator is just the sum of the weights (0.03 + 0.02 + 0.05 + 0.25) = 0.35. Which means Cameroon would have scored 49.52 (17.331 ÷ 0.35). On the other hand, if Cameroon did not have fishing data for that year, fishing would not be included either in the numerator or the denominator making the score without fisheries data 47.357 (15.699 ÷ 0.33).

Additional details are available at: https://www.mcc.gov/who-we-select/indicator/natural-resource-protection
Citation

Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University, and Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) 2024. Natural Resource Protection and Child Health Indicators, 2024 Release. Palisades, NY: CIESIN. https://ciesin.columbia.edu/data/nrpi-chi-2024. Accessed DAY MONTH YEAR.
Disclaimer

This is a preliminary open data release. Over the coming months data curation will be completed by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) and the data will be disseminated through the SEDAC catalog.