Accounting for the impact of conservation on human well-being.

Conservationists are increasingly engaging with the concept of human well-being to improve the design and evaluation of their interventions. Since the convening of the influential Sarkozy Commission in 2009, development researchers have been refining conceptualizations and frameworks to understand and measure human well-being and are starting to converge on a common understanding of how best to do this. In conservation, the term human well-being is in widespread use, but there is a need for guidance on operationalizing it to measure the impacts of conservation interventions on people. We present a framework for understanding human well-being, which could be particularly useful in conservation. The framework includes 3 conditions; meeting needs, pursuing goals, and experiencing a satisfactory quality of life. We outline some of the complexities involved in evaluating the well-being effects of conservation interventions, with the understanding that well-being varies between people and over time and with the priorities of the evaluator. Key challenges for research into the well-being impacts of conservation interventions include the need to build up a collection of case studies so as to draw out generalizable lessons; harness the potential of modern technology to support well-being research; and contextualize evaluations of conservation impacts on well-being spatially and temporally within the wider landscape of social change. Pathways through the smog of confusion around the term well-being exist, and existing frameworks such as the Well-being in Developing Countries approach can help conservationists negotiate the challenges of operationalizing the concept. Conservationists have the opportunity to benefit from the recent flurry of research in the development field so as to carry out more nuanced and locally relevant evaluations of the effects of their interventions on human well-being.

Use of market data to assess bushmeat hunting sustainability in Equatorial Guinea.

Finding an adequate measure of hunting sustainability for tropical forests has proved difficult. Many researchers have used urban bushmeat market surveys as indicators of hunting volumes and composition, but no analysis has been done of the reliability of market data in reflecting village offtake. We used data from urban markets and the villages that supply these markets to examine changes in the volume and composition of traded bushmeat between the village and the market (trade filters) in Equatorial Guinea. We collected data with market surveys and hunter offtake diaries. The trade filters varied depending on village remoteness and the monopoly power of traders. In a village with limited market access, species that maximized trader profits were most likely to be traded. In a village with greater market access, species for which hunters gained the greatest income per carcass were more likely to be traded. The probability of particular species being sold to market also depended on the capture method and season. Larger, more vulnerable species were more likely to be supplied from less-accessible catchments, whereas there was no effect of forest cover or human population density on probability of being sold. This suggests that the composition of bushmeat offtake in an area may be driven more by urban demand than the geographic characteristics of that area. In one market, traders may have reached the limit of their geographical exploitation range, and hunting pressure within that range may be increasing. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to model the trade filters that bias market data, which opens the way to developing more robust market-based sustainability indices for the bushmeat trade.