The Philippines - Grid IP

Overview

GRID works with national agencies and development partners to integrate biodiversity, nature-based solutions, and climate resilience into the country’s transportation project pipeline. Implemented by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the project is embedded within the Infrastructure Preparation and Innovation Facility (IPIF), which is preparing 15-20 major transport investments. By influencing how projects are prioritized, designed, and financed, the project aims to ensure that the Philippines’ transport system safeguards ecosystems while supporting resilient and inclusive economic growth.

Challenge

Transportation is central to national development across the Philippine archipelago, and it is one of the country’s fastest-growing sources of environmental risk. This megadiverse country contains a globally significant share of Earth’s biodiversity and is a recognized biodiversity hotspot, yet more than 90% of its original forest cover has been lost over the past five decades, with road expansion driving deforestation near new transport corridors.

Governance and planning systems struggle to keep pace with development. Environmental safeguards are often applied late in the project cycle; biodiversity data, particularly for local conservation areas, rarely informs national-level transport planning; and coordination across agencies and levels of government remains fragmented. Without intervention, today’s infrastructure boom risks locking in long-term ecological damage and compounding climate risks such as flooding, landslides, and heat stress.

Opportunity

More than half of priority transport projects under the government’s Build Better More program are still in preparation, creating an opportunity to influence outcomes upstream.

The Caraga Region in Mindanao illustrates this opportunity clearly. While the region contains extensive intact forests, river systems, and key biodiversity areas, it is also on the cusp of major connectivity investments intended to link it more closely to national and regional markets. The project focuses here to ensure that transportation planning accounts for ecosystem services, such as flood regulation, carbon storage, and water quality, before irreversible trade-offs are made.

By aligning national policy ambition with strategic planning, the project shifts the question from how to mitigate damage later to how to plan infrastructure differently from the start.

Approach

The Philippines project applies a multi-pronged strategy that reflects the country’s institutional and ecological complexity:

• Upstream integration of biodiversity and climate risk into national transport policies, standards, and IPIF project pipelines.

• Landscape-scale planning in the Caraga Region and Agusan River Basin, linking transport corridors with conservation priorities and climate resilience objectives.

• Sustainable finance innovation, including support for green and nature-positive financing instruments that can shift how transport projects are funded.

• Institutional capacity-building and knowledge management, ensuring that tools, data, and practices are embedded within government systems and can be replicated beyond the project lifecycle.

Across all components, the project integrates gender-responsive and socially inclusive planning to avoid “gender-blind” infrastructure outcomes and ensure benefits are equitably distributed.

Results & Impact

Through its integration with a multi-billion-dollar investment pipeline, GRID’s project in the Philippines is positioned to deliver outsized impact:

• Indirect reductions of approximately 6.7 million metric tons of CO₂e over the lifetime of influenced transport investments.

• Improved landscape management practices across more than 600,000 hectares, particularly in biodiversity-rich regions.

• Enhanced institutional capacity within national agencies and local governments, with hundreds of planners and practitioners directly benefiting from new tools and training.

Beyond quantified outcomes, the project’s most enduring opportunity for impact lies in changing how infrastructure decisions are made, mainstreaming the inclusion of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and social equity in transport planning.

Partners & Local Team

The Philippines project is implemented by the ADB, in close collaboration with the Department of Public Works and Highways, the Department of Transportation, national and local government units, and civil society and private sector partners.