Impact of Road Widening and New Highway Construction on Biodiversity and Its Solution

Abstract

Today, the global decline of biological diversity, or biodiversity, is one of the key environmental problems. Keeping in the view of day by day reduction of biodiversity, Convention on Biological Diversity advised a comprehensive analysis that how developmental activity specially, road widening and new highway affect biodiversity must be included in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process: “Each Contracting Party shall introduce appropriate procedures requiring environmental impact assessment of its proposed projects that are likely to have significant adverse impact on biological diversity.” In response to this suggestion, a number of governmental organizations have released guidelines on biodiversity and impact assessments and several non-governmental organizations, like The World Conservation Union and the International Association for Impact Assessment, are also working in this field. As a result, a new field of study called biodiversity impact assessment (BIA) was created.