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Introduction Communities living adjacent to protected areas in Africa are characterized by high poverty rates and their well-being often depends on park resources. This often results in forest degradation and decline in wildlife populations, for example due to illegal hunting for bush meat. To counter this challenge in Rwanda, a tourism revenue sharing program was initiated in 2005, with 5% (doubled to 10% in 2017) of the park gate fees invested in community development projects. We evaluated the effectiveness of this tourism revenue sharing from 2005 to 2017, targeting communities adjacent to Nyungwe National Park located in south-western Rwanda. Methods We used questionnaires addressed to members of community associations and local government in 24 sectors around Nyungwe National Park. Additionally, data on illegal resource use and socio-economic status of the surrounding communities were obtained to quantitatively triangulate and draw insights from communities’perceptions. Using spatial analyses and spatial regression, we mapped trends in illegal activities relative to socio-economic characteristics. Results and discussion Both the qualitative and quantitative results indicate that the tourism revenue sharing program has not fully succeeded in improving community well-being around Nyungwe National Park. The tourism revenue sharing can consider targeting areas that demonstrate more need and reassessing prioritization of interventions supported by the program to achieve both poverty reduction around Nyungwe National Park and improved conservation outcomes in this protected area.
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Navigating data challenges in socioeconomic impact assessments of conservation regimes
Abstract Scholars are increasingly assessing the impact of conservation interventions at national and regional scales with robust causal inference methods designed to emulate randomized control trials (quasi‐experimental methods). Although spatial and temporal data to measure habitat loss and gain with remote sensing tools are increasingly available, data to measure spatially explicit poverty and human well‐being at a high resolution are far less available. Bridging this data gap is essential to assess the social outcomes of conservation actions at scale and improve understanding of socioenvironmental synergies and trade‐offs. We reviewed the kinds of socioeconomic data that are publicly available to measure the effects of conservation interventions on poverty and well‐being, including national census data, representative household surveys funded by international organizations, surveys collected for individual research programs, and high‐resolution gridded poverty and well‐being data sets. We considered 4 challenges in the use of these data sets: consistency and availability of indicators and metrics across regions and countries, availability of data at appropriate temporal and spatial resolutions, and technical considerations associated with data available in different formats. Potential workarounds to these challenges include analytical methods to help resolve data mismatches and the use of emerging data products.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2108354
- PAR ID:
- 10645402
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Conservation Biology
- Volume:
- 39
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0888-8892
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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