Introduction
Infrastructure development harms our biodiversity, but strategic planning can help reduce its impact. Let’s understand nature-positive development practices, such as ecological connectivity and Green Infrastructure, for a genuinely sustainable infrastructure future.
Why Infrastructure Matters?
The need for better infrastructure is undisputed: roads, railways, power grids, and houses all contribute to economic growth and human well-being. But these developments cross some of the most important natural habitats, posing a significant threat to biodiversity conservation.
Development Causes Problems
New development and operational activities inevitably cause habitat destruction, pollution, and disruption to ecological connectivity, pushing many species towards extinction. It is a question of balancing human development with the urgent need to safeguard biodiversity when creating new infrastructure. The time when we should only minimise harm has passed; development should be nature-positive.
Need for Ecological Safeguards for Infrastructure Development
In other words, ecological considerations must be an integral part of the entire life cycle of every project, from its inception, if the intention is to pursue serious sustainable infrastructure. We can have tomorrow’s necessary infrastructure without sacrificing any more of Earth’s natural heritage.
Strategic Planning and Site Selection: Avoiding the Impact
Avoiding impacts to sensitive areas in the first place is the best way to save biodiversity during development. This takes strategic planning well in advance of breaking ground.
The Role of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA)
A Strategic Environmental Assessment is an important, proactive tool that evaluates the potential environmental impacts of large-scale plans, programmes, and policies, rather than just individual projects.
Application of SEA in the earliest planning stages allows governments and developers to pinpoint no-go zones, areas of high biodiversity, and key migration routes. This allows for the selection of project alternatives that naturally minimise conflict with high-value ecosystems.
Early Intervention: SEA informs decisions on selecting corridors for roads or optimal sites for energy plants, helping avoid resource investments in projects that eventually prove unviable due to unacceptable environmental risks.
Landscape-Level View: It shifts the focus from a narrow site to the broader landscape, ensuring that the cumulative impacts of multiple developments are considered, thereby protecting regional ecological connectivity.
The Mitigation Hierarchy: A Structured Approach to Biodiversity Conservation
The mitigation hierarchy is indeed a globally recognised standard framework for handling environmental and social risks in development projects. It provides a straightforward, sequential process for responsible development focused on No Net Loss and, whenever possible, a Net Gain for biodiversity. This hierarchy is therefore the backbone of efforts to save biodiversity during infrastructure development.
1. Avoidance (The Best Strategy)
- Avoidance is the top priority. It refers to the alternative locations, routes, or technologies to entirely avoid potential impacts on biodiversity. Examples include:
- Rerouting a highway to bypass a protected wetland or forest block.
- It means choosing geothermal over hydropower to avoid flooding riverine habitats.
2. Minimisation (Reducing the Footprint)
Where avoidance is impossible, minimisation techniques must be employed to reduce the duration, intensity, and/or extent of the impact.
- Reduced Footprint: Minimising the width of the construction corridors or concentrating the disturbance in a small area.
- Time of year/seasonal constraints: Scheduling noisy or destructive work to avoid sensitive breeding or migration seasons.
- Pollution control: Stringent control of sediment runoff, noise, and light pollution during construction should be implemented.
3. Restoration (Healing the Damage)
Restoration refers to measures taken to repair, rehabilitate, or restore the degraded ecosystems after disturbance. This typically occurs in situ (on-site) and usually aims to restore the ecosystem to a pre-impact state.
- Revegetation refers to replanting native species in disturbed construction right-of-ways once the pipelines or power lines are installed.
- Soil Remediation: Cleaning up contaminated soils and allowing natural succession to resume.
4. Offsets (The Last Resort)
Biodiversity offsets are compensatory actions taken to achieve measurable conservation outcomes, aiming to counter impacts on biodiversity that cannot be avoided entirely or reduced. They should only be used as a last resort, after all feasible avoidance, minimisation, and restoration efforts have been exhausted.
- New Habitat Creation: Creating a new protected area with ecological value similar to that of the one lost can be another way to save our biodiversity during infrastructure development.
- Habitat Improvement: Investing in the long-term management and enhancement of an existing habitat. The ultimate goal is to create an environment that is more suitable and resilient for wildlife, thereby increasing its biodiversity and overall ecological function.
Final Thoughts On Infrastructure Development While Saving Biodiversity
The journey to sustainable infrastructure development, therefore, requires a change in mindset, from viewing infrastructure and nature as mutually exclusive to one in which they reinforce each other. This can be achieved by prioritising strategic planning, strictly applying the mitigation hierarchy, and pursuing nature-positive development through Green Infrastructure and keeping ecosystems connected.
Only then can the world’s development needs be met hand in hand with strengthening biodiversity conservation. It is now incumbent upon governments, developers, and financial institutions to commit to integrating biodiversity concerns at all levels to ensure that our vital infrastructure does not come at the price of our irreplaceable natural wealth.