Economic Analysis

Successful conservation requires that projects consider a full range of relevant social and economic issues. HGA has provided analytic support to evaluate economic threats to biodiversity, social impacts of development and conservation projects, and the value of benefits from conservation and environmental protection. Recent analyses include:

• For National Parks Conservation Association, assessing the economic benefits and impacts of the U.S. National Park System, published as a report entitled The U.S. National Park System: An Economic Asset at Risk

• For Inter-American Development Bank, assessing the potential for tourism industry to absorb labor in the Galapagos Islands

• For USAID, via prime contractor Associates in Rural Development (ARD), assessing potential economic development interventions in communities local to Bulgaria’s national park system

• For World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimating the economic value of the Mekong River’s natural flood regime in Cambodia

• For the Centro de Asistencia Legal Popular in Panama and the Conservation Strategy Fund, examining the environmental and social impacts of large-scale expansion plans for the Panama Canal

• For World Bank, analyzing land use economics in the cocoa belt of Southern Bahia, Brazil

• For Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), assessing the value of timber concessions in Suriname in an effort to rationalize resource management and to quantify the opportunity cost of forest conservation

• For Conservation International, performing evaluations of community-based conservation enterprises in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve

• For the Union of Concerned Scientists, projecting the potential financial flows to tropical biodiversity conservation from the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol

• For IESB, valuing the avoided costs of watershed protection for the water supply of the city of Ilheus, Bahia in Brazil