Infrastructure's impact on biodiversity

In the battle to preserve biodiversity, humans almost inevitably have a hand to play in habitat loss and environmental destruction. And a study this week has found that 80% of the world’s most important sites for biodiversity on land currently already contain human developments. Here with us to explain the implications is Ash Simkins from the University of Cambridge.

Ash - Yeah, I think it's a good question. Biodiversity seems quite a complicated topic. What does it mean. Does it mean the number of species? Does it mean functions or services? Do they provide pollination? So what we did was we looked at KBAs, which are key biodiversity areas, which are aiming to capture different elements of biodiversity, whether it be things like threatened biodiversity, so is a species threatened with extinction in the wild, or are species found only in small parts of the world? Or it could be similar for ecosystems or key ecological processes or biological processes. So things you would call wilderness areas or key life stages, or migratory sites for birds as they're passing over, for example. So this is an approach to try and combine a lot of different measures of biodiversity to create a systematic network and it's the most comprehensive network we have to date.

James - And you were looking particularly at the impacts of human infrastructure on these particularly important areas, is that right?

Ash - Yeah so we were using data from WWF sites, which is a geospatial tool that they compile to look at near real time changes in conservation, things of conservation values. It could be species, habitats or ranges. It could be these protected areas or these key biodiversity areas. So they have a lot of data compiled from various places on things like road networks across the world, oil and gas, extraction sites, pipelines and then plans for future development, particularly around oil and gas and mining. So we obviously leveraged this stuff for the first time because, in most sites, unfortunately, because a lot of them are hard to reach and there's over 15,000 sites on land across the world. So it's hard to monitor all of them regularly. But this satellite world we're in now enables us to get information in much more real time.

James - And what were the main conclusions you drew about how human infrastructure is having an impact on these biodiverse, important areas?

Ash - I think it's important to say what we looked at was where infrastructure is in relation to these areas of biodiversity. So we can't necessarily get at impact. We were finding that around 80% of these 15,000 sites or so have at least some sort of human development in them, and given what we know from the literature around things like how roads impact biodiversity, or how things like wind turbines, things like that, how they might impact biodiversity, it's likely that them being there is an indicator that there might be a threat happening. So it's the first step in that. But we are calling on people to do more research to fully understand the impacts.

James - Could you speculate as to whether human infrastructure is always going to have a negative impact on the wildlife in these areas? Or could there be examples where some species will benefit?

Ash - Yeah, I think it depends how it's done. Most species are not likely to benefit overall. So there might be some species that are more generalist, which means that they can exploit a greater variety of habitats or environments. So things you might see typically in gardens or urban areas may be more adapted to living alongside humans, for example. So things like pigeons or grey squirrels you tend to see much more around in urban areas. Whereas a lot of species tend to be more sensitive, especially ones that are more threatened. So it depends what species you're concerned with as to how vulnerable it would be. And it depends on the type of infrastructure that you're impacting. If it's a road, maybe if something's flying at high enough altitude, it won't be in the line of traffic. Likewise, if birds are flying at a lower level or if something can't fly, it will be at risk of being hit by cars. So it sort of depends on the context about how much it'll impact it, but there are things we can do to try and minimise that impact.

James - Sure. And we'll get onto that in a second, but a lot of the things you mentioned earlier, the infrastructure projects, strike me as ones that, as we transition to a more green economy, more sustainable modes of getting our energy, are only going to become more prevalent. Are you worried therefore about how this is going to impact on the biodiversity of these areas?

Ash - Yeah, I think it is a cause for concern. As I say, I think there are things we can do in terms of more smart planning. There's this thing called the mitigation hierarchy, which suggests you want to avoid these areas. So these things like key biodiversity areas, using things like species that we know are particularly vulnerable to things like roads for example. You might say, okay, we should avoid roads going through those networks and try and maybe route the roads around them. Whatever kind of infrastructure it is, whether it's wind turbines, maybe put them in area of high wind where there's a low chance of birds flying through that area. So there's things you can do in terms of placement of these infrastructures to try and minimise their impact by ideally avoiding or putting them as much out of harm's way as you can get them, or even putting mitigation measures in to adapt the environment such that species are less likely to encounter direct impacts from this infrastructure.

James - And are there any more ways we can reconcile this need for more infrastructure against their effects on biodiversity?

Ash - You can look at restoring an area after impacts that you've had or restoring completely different areas to compensate called offsetting, which is an approach and sometimes is necessary because the infrastructure has to go in a certain area and it's unavoidable. But I think ideally we need to be first looking at the planning stage and looking at how we can ideally avoid those areas most at risk.