By Li Shuen
Today, we are living in an age where linear infrastructure is expanding across the globe in an unprecedented rate, posing one of the greatest environmental challenges we now face. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as the One Belt One Road is potentially the largest infrastructure development of our lifetime, launched by Chinese President Xi Jin Ping in 2013. The BRI is a web of megaprojects including roads, railways, canals, energy pipelines, ports, power plants which spans across Asia, Africa and Europe, involving more than 65 participating countries to promote economic interconnectivity and facilitate development via two main routes, the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt and marine-based 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.
Spanning across continents, this large-scale infrastructure would have far reaching environmental impacts. Roads, for instance, are reported to cause the decline and extinction of wildlife population in terrestrial ecosystems attributing to habitat loss and degradation (Torres et al., 2015). Roads cutting through rainforests can also cause fragmentation, intrusion of edge effects on natural areas, barrier effects, increased road mortality, isolation of wildlife population, facilitate the spread of invasive species, accelerate forest conversion and increased human access for illegal activities such as poaching of wildlife, and exploitation of natural resources (Forman and Alexander, 1998; Laurance et al., 2009; Raman, 2011).
According to Dulac (2013), it is expected that most large infrastructure development will occur in developing nations, including regions that sustain high levels of biodiversity and vital ecosystem services. Exemplifying this issue, Southeast Asia is due to become a hotspot for booming infrastructure developments which are catalysed by the need for economic and trade growth (PwC, n.d.), despite being a region of high biodiversity and endemism. The BRI will traverse through Southeast Asia via various transportation corridors, by which if poorly planned, could pose detrimental impacts to frontier ecosystems and protected areas, thereby threatening biodiversity in the region.
The aim of this study is to conduct a spatial analysis on the impacts of BRI on biodiversity in Southeast Asia by the mapping infrastructure footprint planned BRI land and marine corridors on: 1) wilderness areas 2) land covers and 3) protected areas, as well as its 4) impact on biodiversity, namely mammals, amphibians and birds home ranges.
Rough project layout:
Using ArcGIS, the BRI land and marine routes will be digitized.
Creation of impact zones: To analyse the spatial extent of impacts on adjacent landscapes, buffers with 1km, 5km, 10km etc will be created along the BRI corridors.
Overlay impact zones onto human footprint map, land cover map and protected area map, to examine the extent of adjacent ecosystems impacted at different distances to the infrastructure
Calculate area and percentages of features classes, namely human footprint categories, types of land cover classes and protected areas by IUCN categories affected within each impact zone