Guidelines to Assess the Direct and Indirect Area of Influence of Transportation Infrastructure Projects

This guide by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) presents a 'market access methodology' to quantify the direct and indirect environmental impacts, specifically deforestation and carbon emissions, of transportation infrastructure projects. Unlike traditional methods that rely on geographical distance buffers, this approach uses social and economic dynamics—specifically how a project changes the cost and ease of connecting markets—to estimate the area of influence and predict ex-ante land use conversion.

• The market access methodology shifts the assessment of a project's area of influence from simple geographical distance to changes in market access, accounting for social and economic dynamics. It posits that the impact depends on what the project connects; for instance, a road connecting a region to an international port is expected to cause more deforestation than one connecting to a small city.
• The methodology relies on three primary components: transportation costs (the cost of connecting markets), market size (represented by population, production value, or proxies like nighttime lights), and land conversion (measured via deforestation data). These are combined into a 'gravity model' where market access is a weighted average of the size of trade partners inversely weighted by the cost to access them.
• To compute transportation costs, the guide recommends converting infrastructure data (roads, railroads, waterways, ports) into a graph (network data). This allows for flexible modeling of various factors, such as road pavement conditions, loading fees at ports, and the difference in costs between traveling upriver versus downriver.
• The guide highlights that the market access approach can capture impacts that distance-based buffers miss, such as the 'fishbone pattern' (secondary roads created due to a new main road) and the systemic impact of a bridge. A bridge may be small in physical outline but can instantly connect two previously unconnected markets, affecting land use across the entire connecting path.
• The carbon footprint of a project can be estimated by overlapping predicted deforestation areas with carbon stock data. The guide notes that the Amazon Fund defines a potential CO2 emission of 48,SSSSSS 510 per km2, though more precise results can be achieved using carbon density maps.
• In a simplified application of the methodology in the Brazilian state of Amapá, a fictional road project was estimated to result in a deforestation footprint of 368 km2 (approximately 2.2 km2 per km of road), which translates to an estimated release of 17 million tons of CO2.

APA

Araujo, R. (2023). Guidelines to Assess the Direct and Indirect Area of Influence of Transportation Infrastructure Projects. Climate Policy Initiative. https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Guidelines-Infra-EN.pdf

Chicago

Araujo, Rafael. Guidelines to Assess the Direct and Indirect Area of Influence of Transportation Infrastructure Projects. Climate Policy Initiative, 2023. https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Guidelines-Infra-EN.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Araujo |first1=Rafael |title=Guidelines to Assess the Direct and Indirect Area of Influence of Transportation Infrastructure Projects |publisher=Climate Policy Initiative |date=February 2023 |url=https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Guidelines-Infra-EN.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{araujo2023guidelines, author = {Araujo, Rafael}, title = {{Guidelines to Assess the Direct and Indirect Area of Influence of Transportation Infrastructure Projects}}, institution = {Climate Policy Initiative}, year = {2023}, month = feb, url = {https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Guidelines-Infra-EN.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }