Climate change is the world’s most pressing and complex problem. While the development sector has begun integrating climate considerations into programmes, these efforts often remain siloed within environmental interventions. By failing to mainstream climate thinking across all development work, programmes miss crucial opportunities to address the climate crisis and overlook the interconnections that shape their success.

For practitioners to effectively mainstream climate considerations, they must more robustly apply systems thinking. The latest IPCC report (2023) recognises the interdependence of climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, and human societies. These close linkages demand a systems-based approach to addressing the climate crisis.

The Environmental Approach for Generational Impact (EAGI) working paper was developed in 2022 by Lamia Renaud, a Senior Expert in Monitoring Evaluation and Learning at Integrity. The approach is a systems-based solution that places interconnections between people and planet at its core. It builds on the Actor-Based Change (ABC) Framework, which was developed to provide development professionals with a tool to help understand how change happens in complex systems.

The EAGI working paper expands on the ABC Framework by encouraging an understanding of the system beyond actors, towards a system comprised of current and future generations of people and biosphere. In doing so the EAGI working paper promotes development approaches that systematically integrate environmental and biodiversity considerations to address root causes of development issues. This is meant to support a more enduring and multi-pronged response to development problems, and to increase the potential for positive long-lasting change, including through promoting environmental co-benefits.

The approach presented in the EAGI paper aims to shift development sector practices away from viewing nature through a resource lens, towards one that recognises natural systems as influential actors in and of themselves in development programmes. This approach supports development practitioners in recognising the footprint cost of economic and social results. It also helps identify the unintended downstream costs generated by these results for generations. This enables programmes to contribute more meaningfully to mitigating the climate crisis while maintaining a balanced vision of development that gives equal weight to social, economic, and environmental concerns.

How EAGI Works in Practice

Using a similar approach to the ABC framework, the EAGI provides practitioners with a set of tools to break down problems into small pieces. This allows practitioners to map and understand the explicit and implicit relationships that exist between actors and foundational elements of a given system. It also help practitioners understand the drivers of change that may be leveraged along the way:

1. Understand the problem and the system in which it exists:

Practitioners can use this approach to:

• identify the relevant problems they are trying to address

• break them down to investigate potential causes and consequences,

• apply a dual lens that considers human systems (society and economy) and the biosphere (natural system)

• assess the relationships and power structures that exist between human and natural systems.

• select problems in spheres of control and those potentially within reach to influence

• explore change agendas for the selected problems through a short-term programme life cycle lens

• and finally expand change agendas using a generational lens.

2. Outline the roadmap for realising transformative change

Practitioners can then refine potential pathways that respond to the generational ambition. To do this, they define what behaviour change is needed both within and between the human and natural systems to realise these objectives.

3. Support the design of interventions and/or evaluations

As a last step, practitioners reflect the generational ambition and transformative change pathways in the design of their interventions or evaluation scopes. By including this long-term vision in intervention design and evaluations, practitioners can maximise the potential for impact and evaluate programmes against generational impact questions.

Using a fictional urban development programme example, applying the steps set out above may look like this:

Figure 1: Example application of the COM-B framework to imagine the change agenda from current to future state

Conclusion and key takeaways

Climate change affects every region globally, with vulnerable communities bearing the heaviest burden despite contributing least to the crisis. Development professionals must advocate for programmes that look beyond short-term results toward generational accountability by:

• Expanding evaluation beyond traditional silos to embrace multi-sectoral perspectives;

• Ensuring diverse perspectives, including indigenous knowledge, in programme design

• Using systems-based approaches like EAGI to map and understand environmental impacts

• Identifying opportunities for positive environmental outcomes alongside development goals

The EAGI approach helps meet donor reporting requirements while ensuring development initiatives consider their true cost to natural ecosystems. By thinking systematically about people, planet, and future generations, we can create more effective and sustainable solutions to today's complex challenges.

Lamia Renaud is a Senior Expert in Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning at Integrity. She leads Integrity’s Climate Security working group. Her working paper is available in open source on the Better Evaluation website.

Integrity is an international consultancy provider specialised in using high-quality evidence and learning to help governments, the private sector and the international community succeed in complex and challenging contexts. We deliver large, complex, multi-country, multi-donor programmes, operating in challenging environments, where conflict and instability interact with climate change and biodiversity loss.

Get in touch: Lamia.Renaud@integrityglobal.com