Global policy initiatives and international conservation organizations are increasingly emphasizing the link between the conservation of natural ecosystems and human development. However, despite heavy investment of time, funds, and research in these linkages, the strength of evidence supporting the impacts of conservation on human well-being, is still scattered, inconsistent and inaccessible. Rigorous and comprehensive evidence is necessary to inform effective decisions and investment in achieving improved well-being of nature and people in conservation. This presentation will discuss the efforts of the SNAP working group on evidence-based conservation to take on a synthetic approach to evaluate the existing evidence for conservation’s impact on human well-being and provide coherent and useful frameworks and tools to increase the use of evidence in conservation decision-making. I will present a systematic map of over 1000+ relevant studies linking conservation interventions to human well-being. I will discuss the value of the systematic map as a decision support tool for rapidly locating data on policy impacts and targeting knowledge gaps to guide future research efforts.
Samantha H. Cheng, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
SNAP Evidence-Based Conservation Group
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), UCSB
Santa Barbara, CA
Senior Research Fellow
Center for Tropical Research, UCLA
Los Angeles, CA