Posted on September, 23 2025

Wendy Elliott, Senior Director Wildlife, WWF Int; Mike Knights, WWF Transboundary Leader, KAZA; Kanchan Thapa, Deputy Conservation Programme Director, WWF Nepal; Rafael Antelo, Wildlife Connect Leader, WWF Bolivia

Movement is one of those things that is key to our daily lives, yet one we rarely think consciously about.

Where have you travelled to today, this week, this month?  You probably went to work - by foot, in a car or on a bus.  You may have gone to a shop to buy food or other essentials.  Now imagine not being able to make those movements at all.  You’d quickly run out of money if you stopped showing up for work and food too if you couldn’t get to the shops and online delivery drivers had the same problem.  What if you couldn’t travel to meet friends and family, to date, or to get to the doctor?  

Wildlife has the same need to move.  The food, water and other resources they need to stay alive don’t always occur in the same place year round – wildlife needs to move to the right place to find the resources they need at the right time. 

They also need to move to find mates – just like humans, they don’t pair up within their birth family.  And increasingly they need to move due to climate change; as droughts increase, fires burn with greater intensity and habitats move to higher latitudes or altitudes, so wildlife must follow.

But wildlife movements are increasingly constrained.  Farms, mines & sprawling cities are eating up forests, grasslands and wetlands, and worse, leaving remaining natural habitats as ever smaller islands, in many cases degraded, and surrounded by human dominated areas that wildlife can’t move through.

Ironically, the very things we build to enable us humans to move – roads, railways, canals, bridges/causeways – can have the most devastating impact on wildlife movement. If these human highways are not passable by wildlife (or not passable safely), then wildlife and ecological flows can get stuck. Isolated populations inevitably decline in size and loose genetic resilience.

There is a growing solution to this challenge – the concept of ecological connectivity, or the degree to which a landscape allows the unimpeded movement of animals and the flow of natural processes that sustain life on Earth.   And with 196 countries pledging to maintain and restore connectivity under the Global Biodiversity Framework, new private-sector tools emerging to track impact, and a powerful new Global Partnership on Ecological Connectivity, the world is finally starting to address this challenge.

We are delighted to have been co-authors of a newly released study, where we outline a ‘theory of change’ for achieving ecological connectivity at the large landscape scale we need.

It starts with mapping ecological corridors – first we need to know where wildlife highways are if we want to secure them.  It then moves to spatial planning, ensuring that when we decide where roads, plantations and mines are located, we bear in mind what wildlife movements they may be impacting - forcing animals to go where they would not naturally go usually fails.  Next comes the action to protect, manage and, where needed, restore these corridors, which are often shared spaces between humans and wildlife.  Smarter, greener infrastructure is key, as well as supporting mechanisms such as finance and markets. Ultimately this will collectively help us achieve the connected and resilient landscapes that will benefit wildlife and humans alike.

The paper also outlines how this theory works in real terms, in four highly biodiverse large landscapes, one each in Africa, Europe, Asia and South America.  And for the first time the paper publishes measures of how connectivity in each of these large landscapes has changed over time.

• Kavango Zambezi in Southern Africa, home to 50% of all the continent’s Savanna elephants, is where a host of wildlife travel vast distances across lands they share with diverse local communities - with connectivity secured through local community engagement, wildlife-friendly land-use planning and policy efforts with governments.
• The Terai Arc of Nepal and India, which is where collaboration between Government, indigenous people and local communities have reforested corridors that are providing vital movement for tigers and many other species.
• In the Carpathian Mountains of Europe wolves, lynx, and bears need safe passage through a mosaic of farms, towns, and highways.
• In South America’s Pantanal Chaco, where connectivity for both jaguars and water are essential, women-led enterprises and partnerships with ranchers are leading the way to strengthening connectivity. 

The same month this paper was published, major news was announced in the Pantanal Chaco.  After scientists spent almost two years mapping all the essential jaguar corridors in this vast landscape, one of the corridors determined to be most critical was formally designated as a protected area, with indigenous communities deciding to also join the effort and include their lands in the area. 

This new protected area is just 87,000 hectares, BUT it has now connected a much broader area of 12 million hectares that expands from Brazil to Paraguay through Bolivia, thus creating the largest consolidated block in this part of the world, as well as safeguarding critical water resources.

This visionary leadership of local authorities, indigenous communities and our local partner the Sociedad Boliviana de Derecho Ambiental (SBDA) is exactly what we need more of.  And we are now helping pave the way for this, working with partners to map all jaguar corridors across its range, from Mexico to Argentina.

Most of us want to see life on Earth - both wildlife and people - flourish.  But for this to succeed we need to think about not just where nature is, but how it moves and how we as humans can make this happen. That’s the power of connected landscapes, and this new roadmap shows us how to build them.