Estimating forest product values in Central Himalaya - methodological experiences

Forests are crucial to the livelihoods of millions of poor people in developing countries. Yet quantitative approaches to estimate the economic value of forest products and other environmental resources at householdlevel across different sites have only recently been developed and experiences on using such methods are only presently emerging. This paper presents methodological experiences from using a structured household survey approach to estimate household forest dependency in two high altitude areas in Central Nepal. Area and village level background and contextual information was collected using qualitative techniques; this was followed by a structured household (n=180) survey conducted over a full year from December 2005 to December 2006. Households were randomly selected and inter alia subjected to quarterly income surveys. The emphasis in this paper is on investigating whether own-reported value data is valid and reliable. It is concluded that it is reasonable to use households ownreported values as these estimates produced aggregated unit values with acceptable properties.