Infrastructure and the Environment

Abstract

Infrastructure is the foundation on which industrialized economies are built. As global population has grown and as economies of many regions have expanded, the quantity and scale of infrastructure has increased dramatically. Although some infrastructure is used to move people and commodities, much infrastructure is also used to control natural processes or to extract natural resources. Thus, understanding environmental change necessitates understanding the role of infrastructure in the environment. We review available inventories of infrastructure and current understanding of environmental impacts for different types of infrastructure. We also examine the current status of aging infrastructure and the potential environmental impacts and benefits of infrastructure decommissioning. Finally, we briefly review policies that have facilitated or inhibited infrastructure decommissioning or environmentally oriented modifications of infrastructure operation.

Enhancing ecosystem restoration efficiency through spatial and temporal coordination

“…Future investments in maintenance or replacement of dams and road crossings will come from many sources with various objectives, but ecological outcomes will generally be secondary to public use and safety issues. Thus, a promising conservation strategy is to leverage ongoing infrastructure maintenance activities by supporting lowcost, high-return add-ons to infrastructure projects that are already underway for other reasons (18,25). In addition, using ecological restoration value as a tie-breaker in selection of infrastructure projects might enhance connectivity at no cost whatsoever.…”

Reductionist and integrative research approaches to complex water security policy challenges

“…The way is thus paved for the benefits of dams, canals and storage schemes, but quietly and very effectively blocked for consideration of some of their downsides: an inability to adapt to future hydrosocial-climatic conditions ('lock-in'); a lack of fit to existing and especially micro-scale/local infrastructure that distributes water (Lankford, 2013); the "false sense of security" engendered, for instance, by levees (Palmer et al, 2015: 585) and considerable but concealable social, ecological and economic costs (Flyvbjerg, 2014;Matthews and Geheb, 2015;World Bank, 2015). Who pays for the removal or replacement of the infrastructure once it is obsolete is one of the more pressing questions raised (Doyle and Havlick, 2009). The concern remains even if the accompanying regulatory and enforcement frameworks are strong and purposively flexible to meet ever-changing conditions, which is often not the case.…”

Resilience of river flow regimes

“…The actual ability of stream biota to exploit riparian and riverbed resources may indeed be strongly influenced by the frequency and duration of low/high flows subsumed by the flow regime, notwithstanding the key role of geochemical, morphological, and biotic factors. In engineered rivers, the ability to characterize the underlying natural flow regimes can contribute to the assessment of the hydrological alteration produced by water infrastructures and the potential benefits of their decommissioning (32), thereby providing an objective support tool with which to embed environmental externalities in the definition of management strategies, services, prices, and incentives. The different sensitivity of erratic and persistent regimes may also bring important socioeconomic consequences, because the resilience of erratic regimes may contribute to buffer forthcoming changes of low flows in rivers with reduced water availability, thereby constraining the security of municipal, agricultural, and industrial water uses (5,15).…”