Understanding the impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on biodiversity in Southeast Asia

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) took the world by storm not just in terms of geopolitical, economic and financial scale but also by its potential infrastructure footprint across numerous biodiversity hotspots across the globe. An overview of China’s BRI and its potential environmental repercussions can be found here, meanwhile this post will provide a sneak peak into the research we are currently working on – assessing the impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on biodiversity in Southeast (SE) Asia.

BRI in SE Asia

The BRI will manifest in SE Asia via the land-based China-Indochina Peninsula Economic corridor and Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor, while maritime routes connected by a string of seaports will travel through the South China Sea to the Andaman Sea via the Straits of Malacca. Massive networks of infrastructure entail these land and marine routes, traversing one of the biologically richest and most diverse regions in the world. One of the biggest concerns surrounding BRI is its investment influence on poor nations with weak environmental regulations and control. Hence, knowing where and what biodiversity BRI will potentially affect is crucial to address its negative impacts and stimulate stricter conservation policies.

How do we quantify BRI’s impacts on biodiversity?

To assess the potential impacts of BRI’s land and marine corridors on biodiversity, we used 11 spatial datasets representing terrestrial and marine biodiversity for pre-processing and spatial analyses. We considered protected areas (PA), key biodiversity areas (KBA), terrestrial ecoregions, wilderness areas, forest cover, threatened species (mammals, amphibians, and birds), and fragile coastal ecosystems (coral, seagrass, and mangrove distribution) (Table 1).

Table 1. Ecological datasets used in the analysis.

To examine the scale-dependent impacts of terrestrial infrastructure and marine roads associated with the proposed BRI routes, we conducted a GIS analysis of the potential direct and indirect effects on landscapes adjacent to the BRI corridors across four key distance thresholds (1-, 5-, 25-, and 50-km “impact zones”) on either side of the routes. We used the term “impact zone” to describe these areas adjacent to the BRI routes.

The direct and indirect impact of linear infrastructure include noise, chemical and light pollution, habitat loss and fragmentation, barrier effects, population decline due to road mortality, spread of invasive species, ease of human access into pristine areas, facilitation of wildlife trafficking, deforestation and land-use changes (Forman and Alexander, 1998; Laurance, Goosem and Laurance, 2009; Raman, 2011).

BRI impacts on terrestrial ecosystems

We show that the proposed BRI infrastructure corridor in mainland Southeast Asia will directly bisect a total of 32 PAs, cutting through 492 km of protected habitat. 84% of these are PAs with high conservation values (IUCN Class I-IV), putting these protected habitats at risk of fragmentation and degradation. Many of these PAs occur in Vietnam and Thailand. Within the 1-km impact zone, 32 PAs, 44 KBAs and 30 ecoregions are potentially intersected. A total of 187 KBAs in mainland SE Asia are affected within 50 km of the BRI, among these, 101 KBAs have little to no legal protection.

Figure 1. Occurrence of BRI land route and its impact zones on ecologically sensitive areas in Mainland SE Asia. (a) PAs and KBAs (b) WWF terrestrial ecoregions (c) Forest cover (d) Wilderness areas

BRI impacts on threatened species

A total of 224 threatened mammals, amphibians and birds have ranges overlapped within 50 km of the BRI, including 24 critically endangered species. Figure 2 (d)-(f) shows the BRI and its impact zones overlap with areas where there is highest number of threatened species - 34 threatened mammals, 29 threatened birds and 11 threatened amphibians.

Figure 2 (a)-(c). Threatened species richness of mammals, birds and amphibians in mainland SE Asia; (d)-(f). Heatmap of threatened mammals, birds and amphibian species with distribution overlapped within 50 km of BRI. Note: Richness range indicates number of overlapping species range in a given area.

BRI impacts on marine ecosystems

In the marine environment, we estimate that as much as 1,026 km2 mangrove habitats, 438 km2 seagrass habitats and 2,756 km2 coral reefs as well as a significant number of marine PAs and KBAs, 20 and 3 respectively, overlap within the BRI marine corridor.

Figure 3. Occurrence of BRI marine route and its impact zones on ecologically sensitive areas in the South China Sea. (a) Marine PAs and KBAs (b) Fragile ecosystems i.e. Seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and coral reefs

So, what does it mean for biodiversity in SE Asia?

While the BRI sounds grand to satisfy the insatiable growth needs of countries, at what cost does it incur to global biodiversity and key ecosystems at such scale of infrastructure development? Linear infrastructure are often precursors to habitat loss and degradation - fragmenting wildlife populations through barrier effects and causing the decline of wildlife through roadkills.

Roads and railways facilitate human access into frontier landscapes and wildlife-rich areas, consequently providing opportunities for hunting and illegal poaching of endangered wildlife and timber. In addition, these modern infrastructures are increasingly becoming conduits for wildlife trafficking and other transnational crimes which utilize these transport corridors to move across borders, especially along the proposed BRI corridors (Duckworth, 2012; Zahler and Denier, 2017).

Besides that, the movement of humans and goods through land and marine corridors could accelerate the spread of invasive species and the loss of native biodiversity. A recent study reported SE Asia to be one of the hotspots for high introduction risk of biological invasion and where invasive species can thrive (Liu et al., 2019).

With ASEAN’s demand for improved infrastructure to drive economic growth through increased trade, investment and connectivity (LSE IDEAS and CIMB ASEAN Research Institute, 2018), we might expect to see massive extraction of natural resources from manufacturing, oil and gas, mining and logging industries; consequently, driving more deforestation and land-use changes in our tropical rainforests.

Along the proposed Maritime Silk Road, increased marine traffic as well as newly proposed or expansion of existing ports are likely to bring heightened risks to endangered ecosystems such as mangrove forests, seagrass beds, and coral reefs in the South China Sea. Marine-based activities that threaten these ecosystems include pollution from ports, oil spills, ballast and bilge discharge, garbage and solid waste dumping from ships, and direct physical impacts from groundings and anchor damage (Burke, Selig and Spalding, 2002).

Already, we are beginning to see its impacts across the region such as the Tapanuli orangutans losing their habitats to hydroelectric dams in Sumatra (Sloan et al., 2018), hydropower plant constructions threatening not only ecosystems but also livelihoods in the Mekong region (Fawthrop, 2018), high speed rails fragmenting elephant population in Laos (Sims and Pinto, 2019), and many of Southeast Asia’s remaining great wilderness are facing the threats of BRI’s infrastructure development (McCann, 2017), just to name a few.

The list goes on (-actually might go on) but honestly, we would just want the list to stop here, right? At least I do!

Indeed, there is an urgent need to address the negative impacts of BRI’s infrastructure development. So let’s hope these science-based evidence will inspire informed decisions- for BRI to mainstream biodiversity conservation into their infrastructure design and planning, and for nations to enforce stricter environmental policies to protect biodiversity from perishing from a human-dominated world.

References

Burke, L., Selig, E. and Spalding, M. (2002) Reefs at Risk in Southeast Asia, World Resources Institute. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1003466.

Dean, J. M., Lovely, M. E. and Wang, H. (2005) Are Foreign Investors Attracted to Weak Environmental Regulations? Evaluating the Evidence from China. The World Bank. doi: 10.1596/1813-9450-3505.

Duckworth, J. et al (2012) ‘Why South-east Asia should be the world’s priority for averting imminent species extinctions, and a call to join a developing cross-institutional programme to tackle this urgent issue’, S.A.P.I.E.N.S. doi: 10.1038/nature11148.

Fawthrop, T. (2018) Killing the Mekong, Dam by Dam | The Diplomat, The Diplomat. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2016/11/killing-the-mekong-dam-by-dam/ (Accessed: 4 April 2019).

Forman, R. T. T. and Alexander, L. E. (1998) ‘Roads and Their Major Ecological Effects’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 29(1), pp. 207–231. doi: 10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.29.1.207.

Laurance, W. F., Goosem, M. and Laurance, S. G. W. (2009) ‘Impacts of roads and linear clearings on tropical forests’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, pp. 659–669. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.06.009.

Liu, X. et al. (2019) ‘Risks of Biological Invasion on the Belt and Road’, Current Biology. Cell Press, 29(3), p. 499–505.e4. doi: 10.1016/J.CUB.2018.12.036.

LSE IDEAS and CIMB ASEAN Research Institute (2018) China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Southeast Asia. Available at: www.cariasean.org (Accessed: 4 April 2019).

McCann, G. (2017) The War on Southeast Asia’s Natural Environment | The Diplomat, The Diplomat. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/the-war-on-southeast-asias-natural-environment/ (Accessed: 11 March 2019).

Raman, T. R. S. (2011) ‘Framing ecologically sound policy on linear intrusions affecting wildlife habitats: Background paper for the national board of wildlife’, (January). Available at: http://www.moef.nic.in/assets/Linear intrusions background paper.pdf.

Sims, K. and Pinto, C. (2019) Can the Land of a Million Elephants Survive the Belt and Road? | The Diplomat, The Diplomat. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2019/01/can-the-land-of-a-million-elephants-survive-the-belt-and-road/ (Accessed: 11 March 2019).

Sloan, S. et al. (2018) ‘Newly discovered orangutan species requires urgent habitat protection’, Current Biology, 28(11), pp. R650–R651. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.04.082.

Zahler, P. and Denier, L. (2017) The Road to Extinction, Reconnecting Asia. Available at: https://reconnectingasia.csis.org/analysis/entries/road-extinction/ (Accessed: 11 March 2019).