Is West Africa forest conservation effective?

RSPB works with local partners to deliver conservation interventions internationally, with the Guinean Forests of West Africa being one of its focal areas. The RSPB, other international conservation NGOs, and many national NGOs have worked with governments and communities on the ground for decades to design and implement conservation interventions to reduce or halt tropical forest loss in this region. However, forest loss continues to accelerate, and such interventions do not always prevent forest loss, but there has been little research on how effective they are, why, or how such interventions can be improved. Analysing patterns of intervention effectiveness in relation to counterfactuals (what the situation would be in the absence of conservation action) is essential to understand how to maximise impact and inform how NGOs allocate their very limited resources to maximise conservation impact in one of the poorest, most biodiverse regions in the world.

This is part of a larger project and the student may focus on a region, country, and/or intervention of interest within that work, or be guided by the RSPB in their approach. Major land-based conservation approaches include protected area designation, community conservation, REDD+ designation and setting aside of forest under crop eco-certification. Changes in tropical forest cover would be analysed using global remotely sensed datasets, using a matching approach to look at forest cover change in comparison to control areas without intervention. Time permitting, likelihood of slowing tropical forest loss could be analysed in relation to intervention type or other covariates.