The Nexus Environmental Assessment Tool (NEAT+) is a rapid and simple project-level environmental screening tool that allows humanitarian actors to quickly identify issues of environmental concern before designing longer-term emergency or recovery interventions. The NEAT+ was developed by the Coordination of Assessments for Environment in Humanitarian Action Joint Initiative; a multi-stakeholder project aiming to improve the coordination between environmental and humanitarian actors including organizations such as USAID, UNHCR, NRC, IUCN, WWF and other partners. It is currently maintained and developed with the UNEP/OCHA Joint Environment Unit as custodian.
The NEAT+ was specifically designed to address the needs of humanitarian actors and to provide a creative and practical approach to integrating more sustainable environmental practices into humanitarian aid. The Rural NEAT+ is available for use in Excel and KoBo Toolbox, while the Urban NEAT+ is available for use in this web application. There are plans to merge Rural and Urban NEAT+ into one application that can be used online and offline.
The NEAT+ assists in flagging environmental issues of high, medium, and low concern based on project-level information, and provides subsequent mitigation tips for addressing these issues. It is not a carbon footprint tool and does not replace the need for a full project environmental impact assessment.
The NEAT+ combines contextual environmental information with site-specific data, both entered by the user. This input is assessed to generate a report which categorises environmental sensitivities into low, medium, and high levels of concern. This report provides organizations with a snapshot of local environmental vulnerabilities and highlights environmental risks associated with specific humanitarian activities. A set of humanitarian mitigation measures and suggestions for further resources, together with links to potential development opportunities, allow users to effectively prioritize areas of concern as relevant to their organization or operation.
A set of humanitarian mitigation measures, together with links to potential development opportunities, allow users to effectively prioritize areas of concern relevant to their organization or operation.
Access the NEAT+
Complete Environmental Sensitivity Module
Complete Activity Module(s)
Decide whether you wish to use the Urban or Rural version of the NEAT+. You can decide using the "Access the NEAT+" page of this website. The analysis of the Rural NEAT+ is completely performed in Excel, the files for which can be downloaded on this page. Kobo Toolbox can be optionally used to more easily collect data offline and to aggregate data at a project or organizational level. The Urban NEAT+ can be accessed directly from this site on "Access the NEAT+".
The Environmental Sensitivity Module consists of questions about the activity area, and should take 30 minutes - 1 hour to complete. It must be completed before the Activity Modules. When completed, the ES Module generates a summary report including risks of high, medium, and low concern, humanitarian environmental mitigation tips, relevant resources and linked potential development opportunities. In Urban NEAT+, the summary report is available in a summarized and detailed view.
Rural and Urban NEAT+ currently have activity modules for Shelter, WASH and Food Security. Urban NEAT+ has an additional active Livelihood module, and Health and Waste activity modules are still being developed. Within the Activity Modules, you can select which optional sub-modules to complete; each sub-module consists of 10-20 questions. When these are completed, an activity summary report is generated, which uses the output from the environmental sensitivity report and the answers provided in the activity sub-modules to assess the potential environmental impacts of the activity and suggest humanitarian environmental mitigation tips, relevant resources and potential development opportunities. In the Urban NEAT+, the activity summary reports are available in a summarized and detailed view.
The NEAT+ is a generic tool, designed for project-level applications across all ecosystems. Thus, the results should be discussed and contextualized to increase the relevance to your organization. Broadly, the ways that the results can be applied can be seen across three pillars:
