Large infrastructure and development projects routinely impact wildlife populations but rarely include systematic assessment of welfare impacts on individual animals alongside ecological and conservation assessments.
The welfare of individual wild animals affected by development projects is systematically excluded from environmental assessment frameworks that focus on species viability rather than individual experience. A development may be assessed as acceptable from a conservation perspective because it does not threaten any species with extinction, while causing severe welfare harms to thousands of individual animals through habitat destruction, chronic noise exposure, and territorial disruption. The emerging field of animal welfare impact assessment aims to make these harms visible and quantifiable, enabling planning decisions to account for them. Including welfare alongside ecological criteria would incentivise development designs that minimise disturbance and mitigate unavoidable impacts.