Social Assessment of Protected Areas (SAPA) Project Flyer

Despite repeated calls from the international community, there is still little empirical evidence to assess the social, cultural and economic impacts of protected areas (PAs). The methods developed so far to assess these impacts are often limited in their coverage, objectivity, and comparability; they can be resource intensive and beyond the capacity of PAs managers to implement.

This project is intended to develop, test and roll out an approach to assess the social, cultural and economic impacts of PAs that can be used as a standard across all sites, is sufficiently objective and rigorous to inform decision-making, but at the same time cost-effective for PAs managers to implement. Without such an approach, understanding – and acting on – the social impacts of PAs will remain an issue of lively debate but limited~progress.