Urban wildlife corridor planning reduces the welfare costs of fragmentation for urban-adjacent wildlife by maintaining movement routes that reduce vehicle mortality, resource competition, and isolation in small habitat patches.
Urban wildlife corridor planning is welfare-relevant because it determines the cost that individual animals pay for moving through human-dominated landscapes. A corridor that allows a fox or hedgehog to move between habitat patches in covered safety is a welfare improvement over the alternative — hazardous movement through traffic, manicured lawns, and solid fencing. Cumulative individual welfare improvements from urban corridor planning aggregate to population-level benefits that connect individual welfare and conservation outcomes. Urban planners who include wildlife connectivity requirements in development approval processes create long-term welfare infrastructure that persists across generations of wildlife.