Biodiversity Guidance for Road Corridor Investments: Mobilizing New Data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Susmita Dasgupta, Brian Blankespoor and David Wheeler

No 11238, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Roads are key drivers of economic growth and form a dominant feature in many landscapes. With road infrastructure steadily expanding—and projections indicating significant growth—it is important to ensure that road construction and upgrades do not trigger direct and indirect biodiversity loss, especially in ecologically sensitive areas. For road infrastructure to contribute meaningfully to both economic development and environmental protection, reliable data on location-specific species distributions, abundance, and conservation status is essential. This paper presents a methodology for identifying road corridors where biodiversity conservation should be a priority for infrastructure planning. Using more than 600,000 species habitat maps derived from Global Biodiversity Information Facility occurrence records, the approach gives greater attention to plants and invertebrates, which are often overlooked in standard assessments. Designed for multi-processor cloud computing, the system will allow rapid, frequent updates as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility expands. By combining high-resolution species maps with country-specific road corridor maps generated by tailored algorithms, the paper classifies species into four conservation priority groups based on endemism and habitat size—giving highest priority to endemic species with small habitats. The method is applied to 190 countries worldwide. The results indicate that biodiversity risk along road corridors varies widely; endemism strongly influences biodiversity-sensitive road placement; and critical corridors for endemic species with small habitats are relatively few and geographically clustered. These findings suggest that significant gains in biodiversity conservation can be achieved by focusing road planning efforts on a limited number of priority areas, even in countries with constrained budgets.

Date: 2025-10-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
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