With demand for energy growing very rapidly in China and India, Myanmar, sandwiched between them, has become both, a significant energy source and a transit corridor for energy, in particular fossil fuels. In Asia, particularly in China and India, energy and the associated development of infrastructure is an important driving force which also has an impact on politics and governance regimes. This is connected with the quest for energy security and the development of reliable transnational energy sources. However, over recent years, oil and gas pipelines have undergone substantial expansion globally. While coal, oil and gas generation have been the primary focus of research on how landscapes may change, pipeline operations have received less attention.
Findings have important implications for future infrastructure development projects in conflict-affected regions in Myanmar and elsewhere.Įnergy development has various potential environmental and social challenges. However, afforestation areas can be of a lower value, and in order to be able to take quality of forests into account, it is of crucial importance to accompany satellite-imagery based techniques with field observation. Whilst substantial forest areas were lost along the pipelines, this is only part of the story, as afforestation has also happened in parallel. Deforestation and afforestation conversion processes during pre- and post-construction periods (2010 to 2012) are compared. Drawing from very-high-resolution-multi-temporal-satellite-imagery, this paper reports on a study which employed the Random Forest Classifier and Land Change Modeler to derive detailed information of the spatial patterns and temporal variations of land-use and land-cover changes resulting from the China-Myanmar Oil and Gas Pipelines in Ann township in Myanmar’s Rakhine State of Myanmar. Analyzing land use and land cover changes can be an important initial step towards establishing the quantity and quality of impacts. In remote and / or sparsely populated as well as in conflict-prone regions, these can be difficult to assess, in particular when they are of a large scale. Energy infrastructures can have negative impacts on the environment.
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