Over the next three years, CSF staff will focus on the backbones of economic development that often drive biodiversity loss: energy and transportation infrastructure. Although big infrastructure can augment the competitiveness of economic activities and increase people’s access to health care, education and other services, these projects also flood, fragment and often destroy ecosystems. To balance biodiversity conservation with infrastructure development, countries must better understand economic and ecological trade-offs.

Through a series of courses, regional forums, in-depth analyses of specific infrastructure projects, and other activities, CSF’s program will gather and aggressively share information globally on what countries are doing right, and work intensively with governments and other partners in Africa’s Albertine Rift and Andes-Amazon regions on policy innovations. This initiative will create lasting human capacity for infrastructure analysis, which will impact biodiversity conservation not only in the short term, but over the coming decades of economic growth.