Posted on 19 August 2015

Yangon: WWF-Myanmar launched a new report on 15^th July 2015 that looks at how a planned road project between Myanmar and Thailand will simultaneously impact and depend on nature, offering a new vision for sustainable infrastructure development. The overview report, A Better Road to Dawei: protecting wildlife, sustaining nature, benefiting people, demonstrates the value of integrating ecosystem services and wildlife into planning and design by highlighting losses incurred by people and wildlife and risks to the road investment itself. Roads can have negative impacts on nature, including habitat fragmentation, deforestation, land use change, and loss of ecosystem services. On the other hand, the integrity of a road depends on nature’s protection against threats, such as landslides, floods and soil erosion.

The report built on an expert collaboration between road ecology specialists from Infra Eco Network Europe (IENE), landscape planners from University of Hong Kong, ecosystem and infrastructure specialists from the Natural Capital Project/Stanford University and experts from the WWF network.

The full report is available here.