Cumulative Impact Assessments and Case Studies

Infrastructure development including upgraded highway systems act as trigger for induced development and land use change. Impacts are not just immediate or within a single lifetime but accumulate both in temporal and spatial scopes. Therefore, it is critical that infrastructure development always consider cumulative impacts on the environment including wildlife and biodiversity conservation. Cumulative impact assessment (CIA) considers changes to the environment that are caused by an action in combination with other past, present and future actions. It is slowly growing in practice but much still needs to be done especially on improving limited data/baseline information, species-specific threshold indicators, useful exercise for high level screening/planning, and engagement with stakeholders.