Calibrating conservation: new tools for measuring success

Abstract

Conservation practitioners, policy makers, and donors agree that there is an urgent need to identify which conservation approaches are most likely to succeed in order to use more effectively the limited resources available for conservation. While recently developed standards of good practice in conservation are helpful, a framework for evaluation is needed that supports systematic analysis of conservation effectiveness. A conceptual framework and scorecard developed by the Cambridge Conservation Forum help to address common constraints to evaluating conservation success: unclear objectives, ineffective information management, the long time frames of conservation outcomes, scarcity of resources for evaluation, and lack of incentives for such evaluation. For seven major categories of conservation activity, the CCF tools help clarify conservation objectives and provide a standardized framework that is a useful basis for managing information about project outcomes and existing conservation experience. By identifying key outcomes that can predict conservation success and can be assessed in relatively short time frames, they help to make more efficient use of scarce monitoring and evaluation resources. With wide application, the CCF framework and evaluation tool can provide a powerful platform for drawing on the experience of past and ongoing conservation projects to identify quantitatively factors that contribute to conservation success.

Conservation implications should guide the application of conservation genetics research

“…Pullin & Knight 2001, Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006, Kapos et al 2008. Additionally, there is increasing interest in the optimization of resource allocation in conservation biology.…”

International funding agencies: potential leaders of impact evaluation in protected areas?

“…Protected area managers are often reluctant to divert scarce resources away from management actions to monitoring and evaluation [24]. In this environment, it is challenging to spend resources on monitoring design and implementation, and database systems.…”

Assignment of measurable costs and benefits to wildlife conservation projects

“…Benefits are usually derived from the increased production or loss avoided of the species that is the subject of the conservation program (Kapos et al 2008). Likely these species do not have any standard market value, and even when there is some commercial value, it typically understates the full social value of the species.…”

“…Evaluating conservation project cost--effectiveness is to measure the improvement in biological outcome attributable to the project, per dollar spent (Busch and Cullen 2009). Assessing the success of conservation projects is difficult for a myriad of reasons including a lack of resources or motivation for project evaluation, unclear project objectives, unavailable data and achievement of objectives that are outside project timelines (Kapos et al 2008). Research related to the ex--post measurement of the cost--effectiveness of wildlife conservation projects is limited and few analyses provide guidelines as to how to examine conservation projects (Kapos et al 2008).…”

“…With annual estimates of conservation expenditures in the billions of dollars, conservation managers, policy makers and legislators must be able to convey the degree to which resources committed to conservation projects promote success (Honey--Roses 2011, Kapos et al 2008, Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006, Halpern et al 2006, Waetzold et al 2006, James et al 1999. Even international funding agencies like the United Nations are requiring that countries demonstrate that their conservation programs achieved effective levels of protection to receive retrospective monetary compensation for project efforts (Honey--Roses 2011, Combes Motel et al 2009).…”