Sustained poverty alleviation requires interventions to be environmentally sustainable and economically viable. The Rural Prosperity Initiative provides IDE with the opportunity to strengthen its capability to assess environmental impacts, to establish the linkage between poverty and the environment, and to design projects that fit within sustainable natural resource limits. Accordingly IDE will, through RPI:

• Develop an organization-wide environmental statement and guidelines;

• Use GIS based natural resource analyses and boundary definition tools for project design;

• Apply a watershed perspective to project evaluation;

• Develop an environmental impact assessment methodology and apply to each RPI project location to identify potential environmental risks and plan for monitoring and mitigation;

• Establish natural resource monitoring networks to assess at risk resources and monitor quantity and quality;

• Integrate environmental assessment and natural resources analyses with project monitoring and evaluation; and

• Incorporate natural resource analysis into technology research and development.