Assessment of Socio-economic Impacts of the Project Actions on Local Economy and Communities
Measuring, evaluating and clearly demonstrating the impacts of conservation interventions on the socio-economic environment is critical for management, accountability, and lesson-learning. This is particularly important for projects that consist of community-based activities or have the potential to impact local livelihoods in positive or negative ways. Our project has all those elements: community-based approach to maintain high public acceptance of lynx; actions that have the potential to provide positive impacts to local livelihoods (e.g. tourism related action); and lastly increasing the number of lynx which can potentially cause damages to livestock, thus negatively affecting local livelihoods.
In order to assess the impacts, we are using an indicator-based approach. A set of specific socio-economic indicators has been developed and values of the indicators are updated and assessed once per year.