Valuation, Data, and Methods Featured Project: RFF & The Nature Conservancy—Conservation ROI Analysis

Conservation organizations face difficult choices as they work to protect, restore, and manage natural resources. What are the most important conservation problems? What conservation interventions work best? What does “best” actually mean? What should we do first? With these issues in mind, RFF and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) have come together to augment the ability of conservation organizations to answer these questions.

Return on investment (ROI) analysis is a tool many organizations use to make and justify strategic investment choices. ROI is meant to be an objective, analytically transparent, and data-driven approach to strategy and evaluation. However, it is not common for conservation organizations to systematically apply ROI analysis to their choices and strategy. While conservation ROI is an opportunity to improve conservation management, communication, and impact, it is also a significant practical challenge. To address the opportunity and challenge, RFF has partnered with TNC in order to:

• address TNC’s current capability to conduct ROI analysis,

• advance ROI as a conservation discipline by providing guidance to practitioners, and

• deliver ROI tools that are useful to conservation managers and leaders.  

Reports and workshops to share and vet the project’s outcomes are forthcoming.