Mitigating impacts on wildlife due to construction of expressways in Sri Lanka

Abstract

There should be a good road network to have better economic development in a country. Therefore, massive road construction projects like expressway construction have been initiated island wide to achieve development goals. These new projects should be environmental friendly and more concerns should be paid on minimizing the damage to the environment and wildlife while implementing them. During the design, construction and operation and maintenance stage of expressway, wildlife is subjected to many impacts and they lost their habitats. Therefore it is considerable to mitigate the impacts on wildlife due to construction of expressways while ensuring safe travel mode. This research study aimed to mitigate impacts on wildlife due to construction of expressways in Sri Lanka. Wildlife Vehicle Collision has become a major cause of accidents in operational expressways in Sri Lanka. The study revealed that accidents have been caused for the road mortality of wildlife, grievous and non-grievous injuries for the humans and property damages. As a result of this, the safety of road users getting deteriorated while involving high maintenance cost for accident repairs. Mainly specific wildlife categories have been affected most and it seems that this problem hasn’t been addressed at the design stage. A qualitative research approach was adopted following a case study to analyze the impact on wildlife on operational expressways. Semi structured interviews were conducted with the experts in expressway construction and maintenance field over telephone as well as face to face direct interviews. The collected qualitative data were analyzed using manual content analysis. This study investigated that the main causes of Wildlife Vehicle Collision, current mitigation methods, new mitigation methods, lapses in designs, lessons learn and maintenance issues. Based on the analysis six major complications were identified from the content analysis and with relevant to that, issues and factors affected were discussed in depth. The important of wildlife considerations at the design stage, mitigation issues at construction stage and administrative matters in operating expressways were identified. Monitoring and maintaining records has played a major role in evaluating the effectiveness of current strategies and requirement of new strategies and based on that mitigation measures has been proposed to reduce wildlife mortality and upgrade the road safety. Finally this research provides strategies to mitigate the impacts on wildlife by alleviating the identified complications. Any how the study revealed that mitigation of wildlife should be considerable but it cannot be 100% avoidable. Key words: Expressways, impacts, mitigation, strategies, Wildlife Vehicle Collision