DEVELOPING CAPACITY OF ROAD DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY, FOREST DEPARTMENT, DEPARTMENT OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION FOR IMPLEMENTING CLIMATE RESILIENCE AND HABITAT CONNECTIVITY MEASURES IN TRANSPORT OPERATION.

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Funding Source and Objective

The Government of Sri Lanka intends to further expand the road network to facilitate mobility and economic development. Proposed developments include the improvement of existing roads and building new highways which will exacerbate the existing impacts. At the same time, GoSL has committed to maintaining healthy ecosystems as well as carbon neutral and climate-resilient development. The inability to find a sustainable compromise between conservation and development is a constant threat to the country’s forest landscapes. Therefore, a better-informed development planning framework is being proposed that would include more comprehensive data and considerations of the landscape approach.

The Government of Sri Lanka through collaboration with a multi-donor trust fund ‘PROGREEN’ administered by the World Bank aims to develop and implement new planning and technical approaches to minimize the environmental impacts of the roads on forest landscapes, as well as to use nature-based solutions to improve road’s climate resilience. The development objective of the proposed activities is to inform upstream planning and green design of transport infrastructure and inform smart forest landscape strategies and related investment plans to minimize and mitigate forest fragmentation and degradation in Sri Lanka.

Contract Agreement No.: WB/ 7203872
Contract Value : US$ 45,500
Contract Period : January 2022 to September 2022

Contract Objective
1. Facilitate the policy dialogue between environment (forestry and wildlife) and infrastructure (transport) agencies and jointly develop mitigation measures, knowledge materials, and prototypes of smart and green transport infrastructure for maintaining habitat connectivity within forest landscapes across the country, identify and inform relevant investment activities; facilitate policy dialogue on the need for applying a forest landscape approach to the physical planning frameworks in Sri Lanka.
2. Support institutional collaborative arrangements between the environmental and transport agencies for cross-sectorial planning of transport operations; support institutional capacity development of the governmental agencies to minimize the negative impacts of road construction activities on forest ecosystem services and natural resources.
3. Inform and leverage lending programs: Inclusive Rural Connectivity and Development Project (P176164) and Transport Connectivity and Asset Management Project (P132833), as well as potential new forest landscapes investment operation.

Final Output
Code of Conduct on smart green transport infrastructure, including green design prototypes and conduct the joint capacity development and trainings as per the plan developed and the final report.

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