Road and rail infrastructure scars landscapes and severely affects wildlife. Based on this observation, a scientific project financed by Europe proposes solutions to avoid this destruction.
The planet has several tens of millions of kilometers of railways and highways without covering all travel needs. If developed countries have a high infrastructure density, this is far from being the case in Africa and Asia. More than 25 million kilometers of highways and 335,000 kilometers of railways would be needed to sustain the growth of the world economy over the next thirty years, so much so that 75% of the infrastructure to be built does not exist today, the vast majority in developing countries. developing. With its network of roads and motorways and its dense rail infrastructure, Europe has long experience of what not to do in this area.
Based on this observation, the program (BISON, synergies and opportunities between biodiversity and infrastructures for European transport) was launched, which has just published its first reports. Financed with funds from the European Commission, this initiative brings together 44 public and private partners from 16 members of the European Union. On the French side, there are actors as diverse as the branch, the Ministry of Ecological Transition, the project office or even “We must gather all the skills to be able to define what is a sustainable infrastructure that first seeks to avoid destruction before mitigating and compensating for it.“, explains Anders Sjölund, host of .
An aging transport network threatened by climate violence
27% of the European territory is highly fragmented. It is the fruit of the history of the development of road transport and the individual car for the west of the continent, the first motorways appearing in France only in the early 1960s. In the East, on the other hand, the road network is little developed and it is in these regions that are still very well preserved that most roads should be built. “If he’s good at […]
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