Assessing the Impact of Conservation Areas on Local Communities

Protected areas are a key tool for conserving threatened species and ecosystems. There is a renewed interest by the international community to designate more land as protected. At the same time, resistance from local communities undermines the effectiveness of protected areas and raises equity concerns that burden local people with costs when benefits of protection accrue globally.

This project contributes to an improved understanding of parks-people conflicts by scaling up from individual case studies using the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Basic Necessities Survey to evaluate protected area impacts on local communities. The study is a longitudinal analysis that correlates indicators of park benefits and proximity to parks with metrics for resident’s wealth and well-being.

The results of the research are intended to advance the understanding of both positive and negative impacts of protected areas on local resident’s livelihoods. The research strengthens partnerships between scholars and practitioners working to understand and improve human-environment relations in conservation hot-spots and mentor's undergraduate students in STEM research.

Human-environment scholars have made substantial advances in evaluating impacts of conservation initiatives, but recent research often focuses on average and aggregated impacts. Less is known about how and why impacts vary locally, or how communities around protected areas have been changing over time. This project maps the distribution of reported benefits of protected areas at local and regional scales, and measures how clusters of high or low benefits correlate with characteristics of households, villages, and protected areas.

It uses repeated measures of well-being to assess whether living near a protected area is especially beneficial for certain kinds of households, such as indigenous or poorer households that depend on natural resources. Finally, it examines whether key contextual factors, such as the proportion of households that are dependent on forest resources, has been changing around protected areas over time.

A better understanding of variation in human communities around protected areas can lead to more contextually sensitive conservation initiatives and help expand and strengthen protected area networks while fostering outcomes that are more efficient and equitable.

This project is jointly funded by the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences (HEGS) Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at the National Science Foundation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.