Roads and railways to connect people are the most pervasive features on the land. Experience suggests, however, that "although [the] central goal of transportation planning is the delivery of safe and efficient services with minimal environmental impact, in practice, human mobility has flourished while nature has suffered" (Richard Forman). Ill-planned networks of roads and railways can have profound influence on biodiversity and can impair movements, disrupt gene flows, and induce mortality. “Biodiversity-blind” developments can also derail economic objectives, counter conservation goals, and dissuade planning of nature-sensitive models of infrastructure.

This two-day course is intended to introduce the transportation ecology concepts for integrating biodiversity in proactive and smart planning for careful routing of roads and railways and to avoid, reduce, and compensate ecological impacts of already-authorized projects.

For transportation planners/engineers, the course will highlight the need to switch from traditional to eco-friendly infrastructure development; for IA professionals, it will demonstrate the success of mitigation plan. Business groups will appreciate why they must pay for biodiversity conservation as a debt for destruction from past actions and as dues for degrading nature in future, and for policy advisers, the course argues for framing policies that can drive development by design for green economy.

Level:	Foundation to Intermediate
Prerequisites:	Participants offering to take the course are required to have basic understanding of impact assessment and ecological concepts related to biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Language:	English
Duration:	2 days (14-15 May)
Price:	US$475
Min/Max:	10-30
Instructor(s):	Asha Rajvanshi, Senior Professor, Wildlife Institute of India (India) Vinod B. Mathur, Director, Wildlife Institute of India (India)

 

Dr. Asha Rajvanshi has a doctorate in environmental science. She has been a member of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) faculty for over three decades. She heads the EIA Cell of the Institute. In her capacity as an EIA practitioner, she has led several EIA studies to assess the impacts of development projects in key sectors. As a trainer, she has been actively involved in national and global capacity building initiatives. She has effectively contributed to the development of learning resources and guidance manuals for mainstreaming biodiversity in impact assessment. These are being actively used as tools for professionalizing EIA practice in south Asia. Asha is also providing professional support to the Govt. of India in the environmental appraisal of development projects. She is a member of the several apex federal committees for environmental appraisal and has contributed significantly in the development of accreditation scheme for EIA consulting organizations in India.

Asha is a member of the International Association for Impact Assessment, and has served as the Co-Chair of its Biodiversity Section for five years. Asha presented IAIA’s pre-conference training courses in Boston (USA), Stavanger (Norway), Seoul (Korea), Perth (Australia), Accra (Ghana), Geneva (Switzerland), Puebla (Mexico), Porto (Portugal), Calgary (Canada) and Florence (Italy) from 2005 to 2015.  She is currently also a member of the IAIA Professional Development Committee.

Asha is currently a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) for regional/sub-regional assessments on biodiversity and ecosystem services for Asia and Pacific region.

Dr. Vinod.B. Mathur holds a Masters’ degree in forestry and a doctorate in wildlife ecology from the University of Oxford. As a faculty member and now Director of the Wildlife Institute of India, he has been actively involved in conducting training and research in the field of natural resource conservation for the last three decades He has also worked as an FAO International Training and Protected Area Planning Consultant in Sri Lanka. He has been responsible for the planning, organization, and conduct of training programs for various target groups. Dr. Mathur also has vast experience with conducting environmental assessments and developing mitigation plans for safeguarding critical biodiversity resources. He is also a member of the Environmental Appraisal Committee (EAC) of the Government of India for the Coal and Thermal power projects and the National Board of Wildlife. He is the Deputy Regional Vice Chair for the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA)-South Asia and a member of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management (CEM). Dr. Mathur is an IAIA member and is actively involved in the CBBIA project of IAIA. Dr. Mathur has co-presented the IAIA’s pre conference training courses jointly with Dr. Asha Rajvanshi in Boston (USA), Stavanger (Norway), Seoul (Korea), Perth (Australia), Accra (Ghana), Geneva (Switzerland), Puebla (Mexico), Porto (Portugal), Calgary (Canada) and Florence (Italy) from 2005 to 2015. He is member of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP) and the Regional Vice Chair of IPBES MEP (Asia Pacific Region).