Nick Salafsky

A Standard Lexicon for Biodiversity Conservation: Unified Classifications of Threats and Actions

An essential foundation of any science is a standard lexicon. Any given conservation project can be described in terms of the biodiversity targets, direct threats, contributing factors at the project site, and the conservation actions that the project team is employing to change the situation. These common elements can be linked in a causal chain, which represents a theory of change about how the conservation actions are intended to bring about desired project outcomes. If project teams want to describe and share their work and learn from one another, they need a standard and precise lexicon to specifically describe each node along this chain. To date, there have been several independent efforts to develop standard classifications for the direct threats that affect biodiversity and the conservation actions required to counteract these threats. Recognizing that it is far more effective to have only one accepted global scheme, we merged these separate efforts into unified classifications of threats and actions, which we present here. Each classification is a hierarchical listing of terms and associated definitions. The classifications are comprehensive and exclusive at the upper levels of the hierarchy, expandable at the lower levels, and simple, consistent, and scalable at all levels. We tested these classifications by applying them post hoc to 1191 threatened bird species and 737 conservation projects. Almost all threats and actions could be assigned to the new classification systems, save for some cases lacking detailed information. Furthermore, the new classification systems provided an improved way of analyzing and comparing information across projects when compared with earlier systems. We believe that widespread adoption of these classifications will help practitioners more systematically identify threats and appropriate actions, managers to more efficiently set priorities and allocate resources, and most important, facilitate cross-project learning and the development of a systematic science of conservation.

Using conceptual models as a planning and evaluation tool in conservation

Conservation projects are dynamic interventions that occur in complex contexts involving intricate interactions of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental factors. These factors are constantly changing over time and space as managers learn more about the context within which they work. This complex context poses challenges for planning and evaluating conservation project. In order for conservation managers and evaluation professionals to design good interventions and measure project success, they simultaneously need to embrace and deconstruct contextual complexity. In this article, we describe conceptual models--a tool that helps articulate and make explicit assumptions about a projects context and what a project team hopes to achieve. We provide real-world examples of conceptual models, discuss the relationship between conceptual models and other evaluation tools, and describe various ways that conceptual models serve as a key planning and evaluation tool. These include, for example, that they document assumptions about a project site and they provide a basis for analyzing theories of change. It is impractical to believe that we can completely eliminate detail or dynamic complexity in projects. Nevertheless, conceptual models can help reduce the effects of this complexity by helping us understand it.

Drought in the rain forest: effects of the 1991 El Niño-Southern Oscillation event on a rural economy in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

In this paper, I first conduct a preliminary analysis of monthly rainfall data from West Kalimantan, Indonesia that indicates that (1) dry periods periodically occur in this otherwise humid environment; (2) these dry periods are often linked to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events; and (3) the intensity of these ENSO linked dry periods has been increasing over the past two or three decades. I then examine the economic costs of the 1991 dry period to residents of several small villages near Gunung Palung National Park. Costs I considered included reduced durian fruit harvest, loss of coffee gardens, delayed rice crops, increased water hauling labor, lost wages in the forest product industry, and increased health problems. The total cost was estimated to be between approximately one-quarter and one-half of annual township income. These results of this ‘economic ground truthing’ indicate that even in one of the wettest places of the world, droughts occur and can have serious welfare consequences. To the extent that the increasing intensity of these droughts may be linked to climate change, prudence dictates that policy and decision makers should use these results to plan accordingly.

Allocating Resources Between Taking Action, Assessing Status, and Measuring Effectiveness of Conservation Actions

Abstract Millions of dollars are spent annually on biodiversity conservation projects at natural areas around the world. Managers of natural areas must achieve a balance between taking conservation action, evaluating the effectiveness of actions taken, and monitoring the general status of biodiversity conservation targets and the threats they face. Conservation practitioners often struggle with decisions regarding the allocation of limited resources among these competing needs. Many conservation projects have only a limited monitoring component while other projects have an inexplicably high investment in a single type of monitoring. We offer a conceptual framework to help guide conservation practitioners towards a logical allocation of resources between taking action and different types of monitoring depending on the situation that they are facing. The framework consists of a decision tree that includes an explicit evaluation of three questions: (1) Are there substantial threats facing the conservation entities?; (2) Are there clear and feasible actions known to be effective at abating identified threats?; and (3) Does the project team have high confidence in their understanding of the overall conservation situation? Based on this tree, we present five scenarios that illustrate a range of logical allocations of resources between taking action and different categories of monitoring.

Results Chains: a Tool for Conservation Action Design, Management, and Evaluation

Every day, the challenges to achieving conservation grow. Threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems multiply and intensify. The conservation community has invested decades of resources and hard work to reduce or eliminate these threats. However, it struggles to demonstrate that its efforts are having an impact. In recent years, conservation project managers, teams, and organizations have found themselves under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable impacts that can be attributed to their actions. To do so, they need to answer three important questions: (1) Are we achieving our desired impact?; (2) Have we selected the best interventions to achieve our desired impact?; and (3) Are we executing our interventions in the best possible manner? We describe results chains, an important tool for helping teams clearly specify their theory of change behind the actions they are implementing. Results chains help teams make their assumptions behind an action explicit and positions the team to develop relevant objectives and indicators to monitor and evaluate whether their actions are having the intended impact. We describe this tool and how it is designed to tackle the three main questions above. We also discuss the purposes for which results chains have been used and the implications of their use. By using results chains, the conservation community can learn, adapt, and improve at a faster pace and, consequently, better address the ongoing threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems.

Classification of Climate-Change-Induced Stresses on Biological Diversity

Conservation actions need to account for and be adapted to address changes that will occur under global climate change. The identification of stresses on biological diversity (as defined in the Convention on Biological Diversity) is key in the process of adaptive conservation management. We considered any impact of climate change on biological diversity a stress because such an effect represents a change (negative or positive) in key ecological attributes of an ecosystem or parts of it. We applied a systemic approach and a hierarchical framework in a comprehensive classification of stresses to biological diversity that are caused directly by global climate change. Through analyses of 20 conservation sites in 7 countries and a review of the literature, we identified climate-change-induced stresses. We grouped the identified stresses according to 3 levels of biological diversity: stresses that affect individuals and populations, stresses that affect biological communities, and stresses that affect ecosystem structure and function. For each stress category, we differentiated 3 hierarchical levels of stress: stress class (thematic grouping with the coarsest resolution, 8); general stresses (thematic groups of specific stresses, 21); and specific stresses (most detailed definition of stresses, 90). We also compiled an overview of effects of climate change on ecosystem services using the categories of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and 2 additional categories. Our classification may be used to identify key climate-change-related stresses to biological diversity and may assist in the development of appropriate conservation strategies. The classification is in list format, but it accounts for relations among climate-change-induced stresses.

What Conservation Can Learn from Other Fields about Monitoring and Evaluation

T field of conservation suffers from having no common approaches for measuring bottom-line success, describing the assumptions made by practitioners, comparing projects’ effectiveness and efficiency, and capturing learning. As a result, managers and practitioners are limited in their ability to learn from one another, and donors question the value of their investments. In this respect, the conservation sector affords interesting parallels with some other fields during their formative years. For example, in the early days of capitalism in the 1700s and 1800s, most managers and investors faced a crippling lack of financial information. Managers typically did not monitor the progress of their companies in any systematic fashion. Unless they had access to inside information, investors had no way of comparing the prospective risks and rewards of investing in different companies. At best, financial data were presented in incomparable formats, and at worst, they were fabrications. To make sound business decisions about a given firm, a manager or financial investor needs some basic information. At a minimum, this includes current and expected future bottom-line profits, the line items and assumptions involved in calculating these profits, the firm’s assets and liabilities, and the firm’s business plan. It also helps to have a general understanding of the progress and prospects within the industrial sector in which the firm operates. Beginning in the mid-1800s, some public companies began to present their information in a standardized fashion and to hire independent accounting firms to audit their books and certify that the information was accurate. Although participation was initially voluntary, those firms that provided better information began to attract investors preferentially. Over time, the system became institutionalized and was regulated by government agencies. Nevertheless, even today the system is far from perfect; the corporate accounting scandals that have dominated the news and financial pages over the past year have once again highlighted the problems that managers and investors face when confronted with inaccurate or misleading information. A lack of information has also caused problems for nonprofit organizations. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, managers in a wide range of fields, including international development, public health, education, and social services, began to realize that they also needed better information. This was essential for making intelligent decisions about deploying scarce resources and for convincing governments and donor organizations that the nonprofits were effective and thus represented a good investment. To this end, far-sighted organizations in these fields began to develop monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approaches to obtain the information they needed. Conservation practitioners can benefit from the experience gained in these fields. To this end, Foundations of Success, in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Conservation International and with support from the Moore Foundation, has undertaken a systematic survey of how M&E is done in a variety of fields, including business, development, public health, education, and social services as well as conservation. We analyzed more than 200 different publications and distilled the ideas they contained into some basic lessons that could inform M&E in conservation. One major lesson that emerges is that the development of M&E approaches in all of these fields has gone through a roughly parallel evolutionary process. Most fields began with external “summative” evaluations of the merit or worth of a completed project or program. Over time, each field added more participatory “formative” evaluations that took place periodically during the life of the program or project; these evaluations were designed to help improve the program or the production process. Finally, in each field, organizations began to integrate evaluation into an iterative project or program cycle designed to promote learning and adaptive management. In conservation, this means that we cannot treat evaluation as a one-off event; instead, we need to build it into our systems for designing, managing, and monitoring projects and programs. Another lesson is that effective M&E cannot focus just on the outcome. M&E also has to consider the intervention being conducted and the various independent variables that affect the outcome. In the financial world, this means focusing not just on the bottom-line profit or loss figure but also on obtaining information about the costs of inputs, the amount of sales, and the production process. In conservation, this means that we cannot merely focus on What Conservation Can Learn from Other Fields about Monitoring and Evaluation

Drought in the Rain Forest, Part II an Update Based on the 1994 ENSO Event

In an earlier paper in this journal (Salafsky, 1994), I conducted an analysis of rainfall data from West Kalimantan, Indonesia, that indicated that 1) dry periods periodically occur in this otherwise humid environment, 2) these dry periods are often linked to El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, and 3) the intensity of these ENSO-linked dry periods has been increasing over the past two or three decades. I then examined the economic costs of the 1991 dry period to residents of several small villages in the region and concluded that it had severe impact on the local economy and thus should be considered a serious drought. At the end of the paper, I speculated that the increasing intensity of these droughts might be linked to climatic change and predicted that these droughts would be a reoccurring problem in the region that would need to be dealt with by decision makers.