Major infrastructure and development projects including roads, dams, and urban expansion can cause significant wildlife welfare harm that is rarely assessed systematically in environmental impact evaluations.
Development project welfare impacts are systematically overlooked in planning processes that focus on population and ecosystem metrics rather than individual animal welfare outcomes. A new road that splits a population in two changes the population metric minimally, but the ongoing vehicle strike mortality, habitat fragmentation stress, and barrier to movement affect millions of individual animals welfare continuously across the infrastructure lifetime. Integrating welfare considerations into environmental impact assessment would require consideration of mitigation measures that reduce ongoing welfare harm from necessary development. Wildlife crossing infrastructure, in particular, has proven highly effective at reducing vehicle strike mortality while maintaining habitat connectivity.