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Speaker: E.J. Milner-Gulland, Professor in Conservation Science, Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College, London
There are constant calls within conservation for more and better evaluation of the outcomes of conservation interventions. However such evaluations are still rare in the literature, and many are hampered by poor project design and monitoring, inadequate data, and the lack of a meaningful counterfactual. Many types of conservation intervention (e.g. alternative income-generating activities and PES) still don’t have robust evaluations in the literature which address both social and environmental outcomes. E.J. uses examples from her research to illustrate the two extremes of impact evaluation – a “gold standard” evaluation of Payments for Ecosystem Services and Protected Areas in northern Cambodia, and a “quick and dirty” post hoc evaluation of an integrated conservation and development intervention in Tanzania. She then draws out some general considerations for evaluating conservation interventions and reflect on the way forward.
E.J. Milner-Gulland is Professor of Conservation Science at Imperial College London, and Director of Imperial’s Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment initiative. She did an undergraduate degree in Pure and Applied Biology at Oxford, a PhD in renewable resource management at Imperial, a JRF in the Oxford Zoology Department, and a lecturership in Mathematical Ecology at Warwick before joining Imperial as a lecturer in Resource Economics. She runs the MSc in Conservation Science at Silwood Park.