CSF will launch African and Himalayan initiatives and expand Andes-Amazon programs through $1.2 million agreement with Biodiversity Understanding in Infrastructure and Landscape Development (BUILD) program of USAID.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) recently announced a $1.2 million agreement with Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF) to launch a comprehensive initiative in central Africa, expand CSF’s programs in the Andes-Amazon region, and initiate a limited program in Asia’s Himalayan region. The goal of the program is to promote biodiversity conservation through infrastructure best practices.

Over the next three years, CSF staff will focus on the backbones of economic development that often drive biodiversity loss: energy and transportation infrastructure. Although big infrastructure can augment the competitiveness of economic activities and increase people’s access to health care, education and other services, these projects also flood, fragment and often destroy ecosystems. To balance biodiversity conservation with infrastructure development, countries must better understand economic and ecological trade-offs.

Through a series of courses, regional forums, in-depth analyses of specific infrastructure projects, and other activities, CSF’s program will gather and aggressively share information globally on what countries are doing right, and work intensively with governments and other partners in Africa’s Albertine Rift and Andes-Amazon regions on policy innovations. This initiative will create lasting human capacity for infrastructure analysis, which will impact biodiversity conservation not only in the short term, but over the coming decades of economic growth.

This project is made possible by the support of the American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).