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Sustainable Infrastructure: Benefitting Nature, People, and Our Climate
Asia is experiencing the highest infrastructure investment rates globally, led by transportation and energy sector expansion. Yet much of this planned infrastructure will bisect some of the world’s most biodiverse areas and affect access to vital natural resources that people depend upon for their livelihoods, such as forest products and clean water.
Poorly planned linear infrastructure—structures that run through a landscape to deliver services to people, including roads, railways, power lines, fences, and canals—can impede wildlife movement; fragment intact natural habitats; deplete natural resources; and cause widespread land-use conversion when natural habitats are removed or altered to meet other land needs.
Infrastructure underpins our societies, delivering the water we drink, the roads we travel, and the electricity that powers our livelihoods. However, when poorly planned, infrastructure has led to declines in the health and well-being of people, wildlife populations, and ecosystems.
If the coming explosion of infrastructure is not built sustainably and strategically, it will worsen the environmental problems we already face and harm the communities it is intended to serve. In Asia, linear infrastructure is expanding like never before, reaching from rain forests and massive river systems into the remote high mountains and steppe regions, affecting species such as rhinos, elephants, orangutans, snow leopards, and tigers, and a wide range of ecosystems.
Natural areas strengthen local economies; increase communities’ resilience to climate change, pandemics, and other shocks; and supply resources important for livelihoods. Careful planning will help countries in Asia avoid or minimize the kinds of negative impacts to wildlife and complex ecosystems that can accompany economic growth.
To support people and nature and conserve Asia’s extraordinary biodiversity, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Asia's Linear Infrastructure safeGuarding Nature (ALIGN) Project aims to ensure considerations to nature are integrated into the infrastructure development process.
The project is implemented by WWF, the global conservation organization, in partnership with the Center for Large Landscape Conservation (CLLC), a nonprofit with expertise in reducing the impacts of linear infrastructure on biodiversity. ALIGN supports efforts in three focal countries—India, Mongolia, and Nepal—and shares lessons learned, guidance, and training materials on best practices throughout Asia.
Nature-friendly infrastructure can—and should—allow nature to flourish and sustain biodiversity. It can also help benefit people by providing millions with electricity, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities and services, and good roads.
Experts, companies, financial institutions, and governments—working with local communities—can change how infrastructure is planned, built, and operated to create sustainable infrastructure worldwide. This can ensure that new projects have a limited impact on nature, maintain and properly manage natural infrastructure, conserve or restore nature, increase resilience, and mitigate climate change.
View more videos on nature-friendly infrastructure in Asia from the ALIGN Project.
In Nepal, existing and planned linear infrastructure projects cross through protected areas, wildlife corridors, and forests and are impacting globally significant populations of tigers, elephants, greater-one homed rhinos, and snow leopards. These ecologically sensitive areas are also home to Indigenous communities and other local groups with strong economic, cultural, and religious ties to their natural resources.
Mongolia’s Sustainable Development Vision 2030 calls for extending asphalt roads by nearly 3,000 km and planning new railways to support agricultural, industrial, and mining sectors. These developments will impact critical wetlands and snow leopards, goitered gazelles, khulans, and the migration of 2.3 million Mongolian gazelles. Mongolia has been advancing safeguards for nature through national legislation, policies, regulations, and standards.
Image attribution: © naturepl.com / Jen Guyton / WWF; © Brian J. Skerry / National Geographic Stock / WWF; © Georgina Goodwin / Shoot The Earth / WWF-UK; © Hkun Lat / WWF-Aus