While infrastructure is a major driver of deforestation, its financing also holds the potential to boost conservation and development. Successfully addressing economic and conservation needs depends heavily on the integration of conservation and infrastructure planning, rather than relying on the project-based, largely ineffective environmental assessment process. This also requires bringing evidence around economic and environmental impacts to the beginning of the process and frontloading environmental mitigation and compensation. Furthermore, the public must have greater access to, and understanding of, information on the environmental and economic values at stake in major infrastructure decisions.

That is why CPI’s infrastructure projects work with opening and capacitating dialogue that will promote regional planning, with the objective of potentially driving a different kind of sustainable development for governments to meet local demands. CPI, through its rigorous analysis, generates evidence on the social and environmental impacts of infrastructure development to facilitate this kind of interaction and to inform civil society of the trade-offs.