Threat reduction assessment approach to evaluate impacts of landscape level conservation in Nepal

Major challenges to the landscape level conservation intervention are to monitor and evaluate the conservation impacts in an accurate and cost-effective manner. Threat reduction assessment (TRA) has been proposed as a method to measure conservation success and as a proxy measurement of conservation impacts and monitoring threats. We conducted TRAs to evaluate the effectiveness of Nepal’s Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) program in mitigating threats to forests of seven corridor and bottleneck sites. We modified Margoluis and Salafsky (2001) framework and scoring approach and calculated TRA index. Threats were standardized to allow comparisons across the sites and effectiveness of management modes in reducing threats between the community-based management (CBM) and conventional government managed system (GMS). TRA index of CBM was significantly higher from those of GMS as evident by various parametric and non-parametric tests including principal component analysis. However, the TRA approach is not immune to bias as it depends on subjective analysis, but it could be a simple and cost-effective conservation monitoring tool to be easily implemented by local communities and stakeholders.