Understanding our impact

As well as providing the necessary information to produce the Conservation Impact Report, this process also allows us to keep building on our long-term organisational memory, and creates the environment of continuous learning that is crucial for effective conservation.

Every single one of our conservation projects3 is different, and each has its own goal, requiring tailored strategies and responses over different timescales. Our projects in 2022 included activities such as on-the-ground conservation delivery, technical support, and influencing.

Fauna & Flora embraces these differences and embraces projects having their own measures of impact, rather than adopting standard organisational indicators. Project teams (and partners) base their own indicators on the project’s specific Theory of Change (a logical model to describe how project activities will drive required changes to achieve conservation impact), and define rigorous monitoring against this.

As every project is different, we use generalised “impact chains” to help aggregate disparate project data and demonstrate progress towards conservation impact:

These help us understand progress in individual projects’ journeys towards success, and towards long-term conservation and biodiversity recovery goals. The steps in the impact chains are deliberately broad; this allows us to aggregate data and results across projects to understand our impact across the breadth of our portfolio. Looking across all of our projects and aggregating the results in this way allows us to understand the impact that we are having across our portfolio of work.

In the impact chains presented throughout this report, the sites, species or projects represented are only counted once and are assigned the highest level of outcome or impact reported by the end of 2022. There is good evidence that projects that achieve change in the early steps of the chain are likely to progress onwards towards achieving their conservation goals 4 .

In parallel, we work with project teams to ensure the information collected can support adaptive management in projects. We have not included comparative data in this report, but you can learn more about how we assess the impact of our work at a project level in our document Understanding Conservation Success, which is available on our website.

3. A project is defined as a set of activities leading towards a meaningful conservation outcome. The conservation result that a project works towards might be a specific biodiversity target, such as the conservation of a site or a species, or it might be creating a specific set of enabling conditions for delivering better conservation - for example by changing the behaviour of a particular group to address a specific issue. A project may encompass multiple sites and or species and employ multiple conservation approaches. A project might be delivered by Fauna & Flora directly, or in collaboration with partners and other organisations.

4. Kapos, V., et al. (2009). Outcomes, not implementation, predict conservation success. Oryx, 43(3), 336-342. Kapos, V., et al. (2008). Calibrating conservation: new tools for measuring success. Conservation Letters 1.4 (2008): 155-164.