Pakistan: Main (Part 6.5)
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Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Project Number: 52167-001 December 2020 Regional: TAPI Gas Pipeline Project (Phase 1) Pakistan: Main (Part 6.5) Prepared by the TAPI Pipeline Company Limited for the Asian Development Bank. This environmental and social impact assessment is a document of the borrower. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of ADB's Board of Directors, Management, or staff, and may be preliminary in nature. Your attention is directed to the “terms of use” section on ADB’s website. In preparing any country program or strategy, financing any project, or by making any designation of or reference to a particular territory or geographic area in this document, the Asian Development Bank does not intend to make any judgments as to the legal or other status of any territory or area. ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT STUDY C-PAK-TAPI-ESIA-REP-0001-07 CHAPTER 6. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL BASELINE 09/12/2020 6 ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL BASELINE 6.5 Ecology and Biodiversity 6.5.1 Key Terms The following key terms are used to support this ecology and biodiversity baseline assessment and the subsequent impact assessment as presented in Section 7.5 (ADB, 2009; Gullison et al., 2015; IFC, 2012 and 2019; WWF, 2019): · Biodiversity is the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems; · Biodiversity values are specific species, habitats or ecosystems, and ecosystem services occurring at a project site that may be included in a biodiversity baseline study. For example, biodiversity values at one project site might include game species that play an important nutritional role in the diets of local communities. At another site, biodiversity values might include rare habitats that occur in only a few places in the world; · Biodiversity baseline study is the work done to collect and interpret information on the biodiversity values occurring at a site, their current condition, and trends before a project commences; · Critical habitat is habitat with high biodiversity value, including: - habitat of significant importance to Critically Endangered (CR) and/or Endangered (EN) species; - habitat of significant importance to endemic and/or restricted-range species; - habitat supporting globally significant concentrations of migratory species and/or congregatory species; - highly threatened and/or unique ecosystems; and/or - Areas associated with key evolutionary processes; · Ecoregions are large units of land or water containing a geographically distinct assemblage of species, natural communities, and environmental conditions; · Ecosystems are a dynamic complex of plant, animal and micro-organism communities of species and their non-living environment interacting as a functional unit; · Ecosystem services are benefits people obtain from ecosystems including: - provisioning services such as food and water; - regulating services such as regulation of floods, drought, land degradation, and disease; - supporting services such as soil formation and nutrient cycling; and - cultural services such as recreational, spiritual, religious and other non- material benefits; · Habitats are the place or type of site where an organism or a population naturally occurs; ESIA_Pakistan_Chapter_6.5_Ecology_and_Biodiversity Page 6.5-1 ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT STUDY C-PAK-TAPI-ESIA-REP-0001-07 CHAPTER 6. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL BASELINE 09/12/2020 · Modified habitat is habitat that may contain a large proportion of plant and/or animal species of non-native origin, and/or where human activity has substantially modified an area’s primary ecological functions and species composition. Modified habitats may include areas managed for agriculture, forest plantations, reclaimed coastal zones, and reclaimed wetlands; · Natural habitat is habitat composed of viable assemblages of plant and/or animal species of largely native origin, and/or where human activity has not essentially modified an area’s primary ecological functions and species composition; · Potential critical habitat is habitat that may qualify as critical habitat; · Species refers to the largest group of similar living organisms that are capable of mating and producing fertile offspring. Smaller groups of similar organisms that meet the same criteria may be referred to as populations, or sub-populations; and · Vulnerability is the degree of threat to biodiversity values. 6.5.2 Overview This section presents a baseline account of the regional and local terrestrial and aquatic ecology and biodiversity associated with the ecology and biodiversity PAI. The PAI for ecological and biodiversity considerations is 1 km from Project-related components, including areas of temporary impact such as camps and access roads, and the construction footprint for the pipeline and other permanent infrastructure. The PAI is the area subject to direct impact and the majority of the indirect impacts. As part of the process of preparing the baseline for the PAI, national and regional level ecology and biodiversity were first reviewed and characterized to develop an understanding of context. Where the pipeline route crosses the Pakistan border in the northwest and southeast of the country, relevant information on the ecology and biodiversity of Afghanistan and India were also reviewed. As noted above, the PAI is the area subject to direct impacts and most of the indirect impacts; however, in certain cases, for example migratory bird species, Project-related impacts could indirectly influence other distant areas. Cumulative impacts are addressed in Chapter 8, covering a set of infrastructure projects planned for Pakistan. A range of biodiversity values were considered in the preparation of the ecology and biodiversity baseline. These included species, habitats and ecosystems, protected areas (PAs), rare species, critical habitat, and potential critical habitat. Ecosystem services are addressed in Section 6.6. Socio-economics and Community Health Baseline and Section 7.6. Socio-economics Community Health Impact Assessment. Appendix C4.1 shows the Curricula Vitae (CV) of the surveyors that conducted primary baseline data collection, Appendix C4.2 includes habitat mapping, Appendix C4.3 includes tree density mapping, Appendix C4.4 includes coordinates associated with survey location and transects details, and Appendix C4.5 shows bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian species observed during the field survey. ESIA_Pakistan_Chapter_6.5_Ecology_and_Biodiversity Page 6.5-2 ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT STUDY C-PAK-TAPI-ESIA-REP-0001-07 CHAPTER 6. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL BASELINE 09/12/2020 6.5.3 Approach to Secondary Baseline Data Collection (Desktop Study) Publicly available, specialized biotic databases and literature were reviewed and analyzed. Electronic databases accessed include the following: · The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN, 2018a); · The Ramsar Sites Information Service (Ramsar, 2018); · World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World (Olson et al., 2001); · Wildfinder: Online Database of Species Distributions (WWF, 2018a); · Birdlife International Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (Birdlife International, 2018a); · Animal Diversity Web (ADW, 2014); · World Database on Protected Areas (IUCN and UNEP, 2016). · Center for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) Invasive Species Compendium (CABI, 2018); · Amphibiaweb (2018); · Avibase (2018a and 2018b); and · eBird (2018). In addition to the literature review, a land cover type remote sensing exercise was undertaken using Landsat 8 imagery from 2017 (3-month period between June and August). This is referred to as a supervised classification by Gullison et al., (2015). The following eight classes were assessed, as detailed in Section 6.1. Project Setting: · Planted/cultivated land; · Barren land (bare areas/bare areas with sparse vegetation, rocks); · Sand (sand dunes); · Herbaceous vegetation (crop irrigated/marginal/rainfed, natural vegetation); · Trees and tree crops (orchards, tree forest plantation, natural vegetation); · Shrubland (orchards crop, shrub, natural vegetation); · Developed area; and · Water resource. The remote sensing habitat outputs are not presented visually in this ESIA report due to the large database collected; however, the GIS layers have been made available to TPCL. For the evaluation of ecology and biodiversity, a 250 m buffer around Project features (that is, a 500 m corridor for the pipeline) was used as this was assessed as the area of direct impacts and the area of most likely significant indirect impacts. 6.5.4 Approach to Primary Baseline Data Collection (Field Survey) Primary baseline data collection was undertaken in the field by NAFTEC/MAB’s subcontractor. Survey work in Balochistan was done from early May 2018 to early July 2018. Survey work in Punjab was accomplished from late March 2018 to late April 2018. NAFTEC/MAB’s subcontractor subsequently produced a report ESIA_Pakistan_Chapter_6.5_Ecology_and_Biodiversity Page 6.5-3 ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT STUDY C-PAK-TAPI-ESIA-REP-0001-07 CHAPTER 6. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL BASELINE 09/12/2020 documenting the results of the field surveys (NAFTEC/MAB’s subcontractor, 2018), and the summary of which has been provided in this section. 6.5.4.1 Purpose The purpose of the field